The Little Things In Life

I'm sure everyone has noticed how little things can mean so much to a person. For instance, perhaps just getting someone's mail for them or helping carry groceries brings the most joy to them. For most people, raking their leaves and shoveling their driveway is something they will never forget.

For my grandma, it was cleaning out her rain gutters on her house. As far as she can remember, its been four years since it was done. Well, the gutter was pulled away from the house and sagging in an eight foot section and there were weeds and small trees growing in it. But probably the most humiliating thing for her was people walking by and saying, "gonna harvest the crops before winter?" or "people always said people in [blank] always grew their trees higher." To her, it was embarrassing. So Tuesday night, I went down with a ladder and started cleaning them out. Unfortunately, I only got one side of the house done before it got dark. I never called and told her ahead of time that I was coming and it turned out she was at one of her sister's house playing cards with her. Well, she called home to have my grandpa pick her up. She came home and said I should have called her before I came and I said, "well grandma, I didn't want to interrupt your busy social life." She got a kick out of it. I plan on going down Friday morning and finishing the rest of them.

In high school, my math teacher broke or fractured his ankle and had a big, clunky boot on so he couldn't go outside and shovel snow. (You have to understand that most students didn't like him because he liked to yell, but he only yelled to get his point across. I always liked him and talked to him about things outside of class that were troublesome in my life. To me he was more of a friend that anything else.) It happened to be a snow-day that day for school and I was shoveling our driveway and thought to my self my teacher could probably use a hand. So I went over and started shoveling his small driveway (probably twenty-five feet long by eight feet wide). I saw tracks through the snow that looked like his tire tracks so I thought he was gone. It turned out his wife had left to go to the store and he was home alone. I was almost done with the driveway when he poked his head out the door and told me I'd better come in before I leave. So I did as he asked and when I got inside, he said to me "so were you shoveling and thought of poor-old Mr.[blank]?" I said ya and he said how glad he was I came over because now he didn't have to worry about his wife being out there shoveling the wet, heavy snow. We sat and talked for probably a good hour and then I left. My teacher proceeded to tell all of his math classes how Matt had come over and shoveled his driveway (I found out about this because an underclassman told me he was telling everyone).

After doing these things, you get a feeling of great accomplishment. To me, it never seems to matter the size of the task, but how much it means to the other person. I guess the moral of the story is to go out of your way once in a while to do something nice for another person, whether you know them or not. I usually never think about how much time it took, rather how thankful and happy that person is.