Little Green Bowl

A few months ago my friend Tiff moved to Vegas. We loved burlap, cake pops, and anthropologie kitchen provisions equally. Shortly thereafter I was perusing the anthro sale rack at City Creek and found a green sugar bowl with the tiniest spoon you ever did see. My first thought was, "Tiff would love this." My second thought was, "I love this. I love miniature anything and I even love sugar. I think I love this more than Tiff would love this." I bought it.

Every Monday on my day planner for June and July I wrote MAIL TIFF BOWL but never crossed it off. I was still teetering back and forth about sending it her way. After all, I could send Tiff anything and she'd be happy. She would never know I was holding back. In the back of my mind was the annoying reminder of a tactic I learned prepping for the ACT...that your first instinct is usually correct. My first instinct was to send it to Tiff.

After roughly eight weeks of hoarding an unused sugar bowl in my hall closet I decided to quit being selfish. Tiff's entire household had been sick for a month, she was transitioning to a new life, and her husband had just torn his ACL and required surgery. It was time to mail the petite green pick-me-up. I couldn't find a box small enough anywhere upstairs so I walked barefoot down into our crawl space to rummage through the extra shipping supplies I stash next to our water softener. I found a tiny box. I also felt wet carpet.

Two days later we had a new water regulator on our main line and a serviced, watertight water softener. I am thanking my lucky stars that our who-knows-how-long-we-have-had-100-psi-water-pressure only split a few elbows on our softener instead of breaking every appliance we own. (You hear that, Dixons? Our original dishwasher is still in fine form. You guys are going down as we will win the "Who Has the Original Starter Home Dishwasher the Longest" award.)

I couldn't help but think how ironic is was that by ignoring the prompting to be generous I was also ignoring the route to discovering we had water issues. The carpet was only wet for a 1' radius around the softener and the only thing that close to the softener was my shipping boxes. Despite my going down to the crawl space regularly I would have never found the leak unless I had specifically been grabbing a shipping box while barefoot.

Merci, little green bowl. I will try to be less of a green-eyed monster and more of a green bowl giver.