An Unlikely Angel

Last month we sold our house and the night before two back-to-back showings were scheduled, there was a torrential downpour. This wasn’t an ordinary rain. It was something I’d never seen in our thirty-plus years of living there. A gully gusher, as they like to say in the South. Leaves from various trees, plus tons of cotton and catkins from in-bloom cottonwood trees settled in huge bunches, totally clogging the gutters and downspouts on the house. Water overflowed everywhere. Bits of debris coated the windows and the front of the house. The next morning, it was still pouring rain, still blustery, still cold. We crossed our fingers and made an emergency call to the man who sometimes did outdoor work for us. He’s in his mid-sixties, has a long, grizzled beard and no teeth. He told me he’d had false teeth made but promptly lost them and learned to get along without teeth just fine. He lives in an RV on a rented vacant lot and has an eighteen-year-old chihuahua who goes everywhere as his constant companion. In spite of the persistent rain, he gamely assured us he’d be here in an hour and no kidding, he was. While my husband started hosing down the decks and the outside of the house, Tom got to work on the gutters and downspouts.  When I asked him about not wearing a raincoat, he grinned and said, “If I get wet, I’m not moving fast enough.” Forty-five minutes later, everything was in order for the first showing, and those people ended up being the ones who bought our house. I’ve decided angels come in all sizes and shapes. Sometimes they even have long beards and no teeth.

Image courtesy TuendeBede at Pixabay