Mysterious benefactor

When I was 16 or 17, I drove around a lot more than I do nowadays, and I developed a habit of leaving my windows down in the rain. Not completely rolled down-- I'd just leave the windows open a crack so that the car wasn't quite as stifling hot when I got back into it, and invariably when I did so, it would rain. I even wrote a poem about it (that is back when I wrote poetry). Well, the poem wasn't literally about leaving my windows down in the rain... the windows thing was more of a metaphor for other bad habits I couldn't seem to break.

We've been parking our car on the driveway this week, because our garage is full of boxes left over from our garage sale that we are still trying to figure out what to do with. I had to run an errand yesterday, and the car was ridiculously hot after being out in the sun all day. Will was soaked through with sweat when we got home. So I left the windows down, just a little. I guess I still haven't broken the habit.

And then I promptly forgot about it. I didn't remember about the windows until today, when I was nursing Will before his nap, and it started pouring down rain. Well, there was nothing I could do about it. I got Will to sleep (it took forever for some reason), and then I tiptoed downstairs to look out the window and see if it was worth it to dash outside and roll up the car windows.

Much to my surprise, I saw that there was a black tarp draped over the car. I did not recognize the tarp, so I was a bit confused. I sent Rob a quick email, "Did you put a tarp on the car before you left for work today?" My message confused him. No, he replied, he had not put a tarp on the car.

Well, someone had put a tarp on our car.

With the tarp covering the car, there wasn't much of a point of me running out in the torrential downpour to roll up the windows. I didn't know what to do exactly, so I just waited it out. I did other stuff around the house, and after a while, the rain quit as suddenly as it had begun. I looked out the window again and saw that the tarp had been removed.

The only way to explain this is that one of our neighbors must have seen that the windows were cracked and put the tarp on the car when it started to rain, then taken it back off when the rain ended. Weird. I'm wondering if it might have been the construction workers who are working on a home across the street. The tarp looked like something they might have had, and we all wave at each other sometimes when I'm going in or out of the house to take Will for a walk.

At any rate, my thanks goes out to whoever put the tarp on our car. Although I feel like kind of a loser for leaving my windows down in the first place, it is nice to have such caring and thoughtful neighbors.

Only in Urbana.