I write this post for you, in the wee hours of the morning, to tell a tale of woe, struggle, and a 30-cent spring.
My Jetta threw a check engine light a few weeks ago. Not a big deal, my husband said. While the dealership repair would have been a few hundred dollars, he found a knockoff part on Amazon for a few bucks.
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Birds were singing, the flowers were just starting to bloom, and he was humming along putting the replacement part back in.
Until the spring attachment started falling off—into the bowels of the engine.
And it wasn’t a regular spring. It was a tiny little thing.
The first time this happened it was easy to find. The second time the spring disappeared. No sign of it. My husband looked, I looked, we took two flashlights and scoured what we could see, but no glint of metal.
My husband was more upset than usual. He wanted so badly to walk away, call it a day, but he calmed down enough to get the magnetic extension and we prayed the spring was ferrous.
Thankfully, it was.
After about twenty minutes of emotional silence, it was found. Carefully, surgically, he put it in place, and my car got put back together.
“It was 30 cents,” he said.
“What was?”
“That spring. There was an option to buy an extra spring for 30 cents, but I was being cheap and didn’t get it. Now I know why they sold an extra one.”
All that turmoil over something worth a little more than a quarter.
Do you ever feel like that? That life is throwing you one obstacle or another, and if you’d only known that one other thing, perhaps a scenario would have played out differently.
This semester is coming to a close for me. I’ve been up since this past weekend early wrapping up grades as my final was this week. I’m sure my students would give more than 30 cents to make sure they got an A on the final exam.
As for writing? Everything has taken a back seat to my job this month seems like, as stuff has piled up. There has been some adventure along with some chapters closed, but in the end, I hope the way set before me is one that will carry me forward with a sense that the path is hedged with thorny bushes to keep us on the right track.
So I aim to get back to my writing this summer, those two books in the editing stage, get further along in my career, build more in my relationships, and have more adventures to write about.
What are your plans for the summer, dear readers?