For Want of a Mop

Some of us were discussing last night the old neighborly habit of borrowing sugar or eggs or what-have-you. And it took my mind back to the day several years ago when I truly, desperately needed a mop.

On a Thursday afternoon I was doing laundry and getting ready to host a small Bible study in my home that evening. Two ladies with whom I had been meeting for some time were coming, along with a guest. My husband was out of town at a conference, and whenever Stu left town, something, without fail, would go hideously wrong. This time, it was the sewer line. When the washing machine drained itself, all that water came up through the powder-room toilet and into the front hallway instead of through the sewer line like it was supposed to.

I ran to the garage to fetch our mop, but quickly realized that the Swiffer-type mop which I owned was thoroughly inadequate to the task. I needed a MOP--and a real old-fashioned one, not this pathetic new-fangled thing. So I ran out my front door, turned left, and started knocking on doors. One neighbor after another confessed that the Swiffer-type mop was all that they had also. Good grief. We are all so modern!

I finally in despair knocked on one last door, and my wonderful next-door neighbor (the one who lived to the right) had not one real mop but two, and marched over the lawn to my house with both of them in hand, and helped with the clean-up. Bless her chatty old Italian heart. I owe her so much.

By the time the other ladies arrived to study a couple of hours later the hallway was restored to its usual dry self, but the man with the giant motorized plumbing snake had arrived also, and was reaming out our sewer line through the access in the pantry with an alarming level of noise. We valiantly decided to go through with the Bible study anyway for the sake of the guest, and sat around the corner from the pantry in the living room, cheerfully bellowing at each other in order to be heard above the sound of the motor. I don't remember the passage for the evening, but the guest reminded me years later that she clearly recalled my explaining the Ark of the Covenant through the din. It was an evening none of us could ever forget.

Love, Spud