Mrs. Jones' Helper

                             Mrs. Jones’ Helper

Look into the bottom off an empty bag of Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies and each crumb you find is as different and unique as my brother, Sam, and I. I loved pretty things like dolls and flowers; he liked dirt and trucks. I loved to sit and watch TV with a bag of my favorite cookies; he liked to build tree forts with his best friend.  I liked to skip and run gleefully in fields of long grass and flowers; he liked to wade out waist deep into the stinky slough and catch bull frogs with his bare hands. We came from the same family and were only one year apart in age but as you can see our similarities ended with hair and eye color.
 
We had the luxury of growing up beside the Jones’ house.  Why was that a luxury? Flowers- lots and lots of pretty flowers.  Mrs. Jones planted flowers in every nook and cranny of her backyard and each day I would awaken to the smells and colors of new buds bursting to open.  The perfume floated for blocks on a breezy summer day.
 
Every Saturday morning I leaped out of bed just in time to see the new delivery truck bring a fresh colorful load of daisies, or lavender or rose bushes. I could feel the smell of the truck’s contents in the back of my throat.  I would get lost in their scent and twirled around while I ran to find a crayon that matched their color. My brother on the other hand hopped out of bed just to see what make and model of truck it was.
 
On one particular Saturday, the truck did not have a bounty of my precious wonder but a huge pile of……what?  Upon closer inspection the stuff was too big to be dirt and too light to be rocks and the truck was a dump truck no less.  What happened to my flowers?
“Bark mulch!” Mrs. Jones said as she watched the questions run across my face at record speed. I startled at this command because I didn’t see Mrs. Jones standing there inspecting her large dusty pile of “stuff.” As the truck dumped its load, there was a distinct smell emanating from the fresh dirty pile of “stuff” and it was not the perfume of a perfect rose by any means.
“What is bark mulch?”
“This is a ground cover that we use to decorate our garden and……………..” continued Mrs. Jones but she had lost me at decorate. Six year olds can only grasp so much in the gardening world outside of “flowers”. While I was still trying to understand why my Saturday was not going to be as exciting as I had imagined, Mrs. Jones got her shovel and rake and started to work. She threw mulch in huge shovelfuls behind her head to the garden under her bedroom window. Then she would rake the mulch gently in and around her precious shrubs.  I had to admit that this did decorate my lovely flowers beautifully but why did it have to smell so bad?
Sweat poured down from under Mrs. Jones hat as she worked.  Sam came by to see what Mrs. Jones was doing with this delicious pile of dirt after the beautiful muddy dump track left.

“What’s up?” he asked as he titled his head from side to side trying to formulate an answer in a seven year old’s brain. I could see the excitement of excavating the pile of dirt with his trucks and diggers mount in his eyes, and he trembled with the fun he was about to have.
“Gardening,” Mrs. Jones grumbled.
“Decorating!” I blurted out knowledgeably with my hands on my hips.
“Can I help?” Sam eagerly went for the shovel without waiting for a reply.
“Sure Sam, you shovel and I will rake.  That will be a big help!”

It soon was time for Mrs. Jones to do the grocery shopping. Sam wanted to continue working but Mrs. Jones really wanted to supervise him.  She knew Sam very well and didn’t want his trucks rerouting all her hard work. She suggested that we all take a break and she would call us when she got back. Off we went in our own directions – mine directly for milk and cookies. As I munched on cookies and watched TV, I heard the shoveling begin in the next yard and went to find Sam. I figured it was time to help Mrs. Jones again.  He was nowhere in the house. He was probably down the street at Roger’s building their tree fort or playing in Rodger’s sand box with all the Tonkas.

During dinner that night there was knock on the door.  Dad opened it to find Mrs. Jones shaking on our porch with her tearful eyes.  Before my dad could say a word Mrs. Jones started screaming,
“Sam what have you done, why did you do such a thing, how could you???” Not comprehending that she was in stress he replied,
“I helped you get your job finished, Mrs. Jones.  I shoveled and shoveled until the pile was all gone. Aren’t you proud of me?” Sam‘s grin was from ear to ear.
“Pile, pile, I’ll tell you where there is a pile - in my bedroom.  Sam, you shoveled all the mulch through the open window. We all looked at Sam in amazement.  What had he done? All Sam could say when his actions had sunk in was, “ooops!?” I could hear him say in his mind – “but I didn’t use my trucks.”

There is an old saying – “no good deed goes unpunished.” I can still hear my brother shoveling himself out of trouble to this day.