When you care enough. . .

 It was a fair day for March (we wouldn't have been working if too windy--there's nothing more futile than trying to clean up leaves in the wind). My husband, Dave, and I own a lawn service, and most of the time we are its only employees. We'd been at it for a while, using both our pickups. Dave had our diesel work truck pulling our enclosed trailer filled with mowers, string trimmers, and blowers. I was driving his pickup and pulling our dump trailer with four-foot sides so we would have plenty of space for the leaves, limbs, and lawn debris that we were removing from the yards of our customers.

Dave with his Toro bagging mower, plus assorted others.

I'll let you in on a little secret:  yard cleanups are not our favorite thing to do. Maybe it's because we are reluctantly crawling out of semi-retirement after having spent a good amount of time in some sunny place other than Kansas, maybe it's because we didn't keep exercising faithfully while we were in said sunny place and we might be a wee bit out of shape and lifting bags of mulched leaves and bending and picking up a winter's worth of branches from the lawn makes us wish we were still at home in the recliner watching "Family Feud."

But we were out there, and we were working. One of the first things we do on an extensive spring cleanup is take one of our high-powered backpack blowers and blow all of the leaves away from the flower beds, fences, and corners where they tend to collect. 

Back in the day, when our kids were still working with us and we tended to do clean-ups for whomever happened to call and not just our regular customers, we kept a mental list of interesting finds as we unearthed strata of leaves and debris that may have been untouched for a decade or more. One particular spring we seemed to find lots of animal carcasses--bunnies, an opossum, even a cat. Yes, a cat.

We've also found money--I found a $5 bill on top of a pile of leaves in a stairwell. Dave found parts of a $100 bill after mowing. Unfortunately, not more than fifty percent of it, and not the parts with the security numbers. Darn.

We used to find lots of the free newspapers--Pennypower, and the Eaglet (was that its name, or did I just call it that?). Of course, we also find fast food trash, especially if we are close to busy retail areas. Usually finding paper products is annoying, because we have to take time to manually remove it.

So, we'd been blowing out the leaves from a large corner lot, I'd done the back yard and Dave had done the front. He's really good at making the leaves go where he wants them to go, he can blow them into a pile or spread them out. I secretly call him the Leaf Whisperer. Anyway, when I went to my truck for something and saw a card on the seat, I knew immediately where it had come from.

Dirty, torn, slightly creased, the greeting card had been residing in a pile of leaves for at least four months, and it looked like it. I picked it up and opened it. It was one of the cheesy, wordy kind that we used to give each other when we were dating and first married.

But what caught my eye was DAVE HAD SIGNED IT! 

What were the chances that he would find an unused greeting card in a pile of leaves? But who in his right mind would sign such a card, dirty as it was, and pass it off as the sentiments of his heart? 

Dave, apparently.

I, of course, thought this was hilarious. HE HAD SIGNED IT!

And, as I automatically do, I turned it over to see the purchase price. 

Wow, $4.99 USA price, $5.95 in Canada. This was no dollar store card. It may have come from Wal-Mart or even Hallmark! Blue Mountain Arts is located in that ultra-hip, super-cool runner-friendly but pricey town of Boulder, CO. I couldn't find a date on the card, but it seemed to me a little dated, more from Dave's and my dating era back in the 1900s instead of post 2000s. As such, it would have been a REALLY expensive card. Where had it been residing, unused for so long? And how had it come to the bushes that we would be cleaning up today?

I didn't know, but the fact that my opportunistic husband seized the day (and the pen) to declare his love for me on its grimy trifold made me think that in fact the card had been created for exactly such a time as this.

I saved it. Of course. Dave and I have been married 35 years and I will keep him too. Even in the middle of tough jobs like yard clean-ups, he makes me laugh.