My son graduated from school in Kalispell, Montana so we headed up for the event and festivities. I rented a house on one side of Main Street and his Mom rented a house about 5 blocks away, on the other side of Main Street. Kalispell is a small town outside Glacier National Park, with a modest popular of 22,000 people or so. Which means, yeah, it’s pretty darn small. Kind of the rugged mountain version of small town America, really, with a quiet downtown that closes up around 8.30pm or so and becomes a ghost town. It’s also a really cute place and I’ve enjoyed getting to know it over the few years G- has been up there at school.
But a funny thing happened this time we were up there. My older daughter decided that the warm cosy blankets that were at her Mom’s place would be really useful to have at the place I rented and she was sleeping. Without telling any of us. If that wasn’t enough, we were driving through Bozeman, Montana (about 5 hours from Kalispell) when I looked back and noticed that she’d brought one of the throw blankets from the house with us!
Now the tally was three blankets missing in action: two from Linda’s place and one from my place. Linda’s home owner promptly contacted her and asked where the blankets were because they were family heirlooms (of course, nothing’s ever simple), while my homeowner hadn’t even realized one of her blankets was missing! My gal does finally realize that she has two spare blankets that aren’t hers after some investigation, but when I ask if she could just drive them over to the other house (remember, they’re 5 small town blocks apart) she defers, saying she doesn’t want to get in the middle of things.
Now what? Do I drive 1000 miles to move the blankets? Should she mail them to me in Colorado, as she suggested, so I can mail them back to the other homeowner in Kalispell, a 2000 mi roundtrip to avoid a 5 block drive? Do we hire an Uber or Lyft driver to courier two blankets?
It gets better. The gal with my rental said she’d be at the house Sunday at 11am and the other homeowner was welcome to come by and get the blankets. I relay that to Linda, she relays that to her home owner who tells us she’s out of town until Tuesday. HOW COMPLEX CAN THIS GET?
Finally, a solution: My gal shares her phone number and asks the other property owner to call her so they can work out logistics. Took a week to get to that point, but then it’s the wrong $#@$%# number. Crazy. More email, more delays, more contemplating just buying two new darn blankets and writing it off as a sanity tax. Finally, the story has a happy ending, because once my gal corrected her phone number, we sent that to the other property owner, they talked, probably cursed us dumb renters, and worked out how to transfer the blankets from one home to the other.
The missing throw blanket from the car? I’m off to the post office as soon as I’ve posted this article to mail it north. And my daughter’s paying postage…