Our hot tub could tell stories.
It’s an eight-person Morgan that’s been through two houses and lasted 12 years so far. Originally gotten in a fire sale from an estranged divorcee (before the ex came home and claimed the items), it graced my husband’s backyard under the pergola and was mostly used as a heating treatment for his aching back.
Then when we moved to our new house, it got loaded up, hauled outside city limits, and manhandled off the trailer onto a paver stone foundation by my husband and me. The wood frame was a little cracked, but it still fired right up.
A few years later we decided to upgrade and pour an actual concrete foundation for our back porch instead of fighting weeds that kept coming up between the paver stones. My husband, ever the frugal person, convinced me we could move the hot tub ourselves with his tractor and dollies.
So that’s what we did. After draining out the water he slid the forklift pallet prongs underneath with his tractor and gently lifted each side. I then slid a dolly into the space to catch the hot tub as he lowered it back down. Such was our method until there were eight dollies positioned underneath.
Then we tied a rope around it, hooked the ends to the tractor bucket, and slowly started dragging the hot tub across the paver stones, onto the grass, and off to the side where it would be out the way for the concrete to be poured.
During that process, we lost two of the eight dollies to ruts in the dirt.
After our back porch was built, it rained and made moving the hot tub back even more interesting (we would have lost more dollies to mud, but I was rotating the ones that were trailing out from behind the hot tub and putting them in front like a conveyor belt); eventually the old girl creaked back into her resting place.
She’d survived yet another move.
Then we rewarded the faithful hot tub with two coats of stain and some new nails to hold up dangling trim. It will be the last time she moves. If we sell the house she stays.
Have you ever felt like our hot tub? As we were staining I imagined if it could think it would have had a realization: just because you go in circles doesn’t mean you can’t improve.
We wake up, day in and day out. We go to work. We converse with people. We weave through the day’s routine only to come back full circle and prepare for the following day’s routine.
But that doesn’t mean things can’t get better. That doesn’t mean things can’t improve within the steps. Your life is what you make of it—go out there and put on a fresh coat of paint.