Really? My Snowshovel?

Our porch giveth and our porch taketh away. And last week my porch tooketh my snow shovel. Porches and snow shovels seem like peas in a pod. According to my observations they have what Biologists call a symbiotic relationship - like Rhinoceri and that little bird that picks food out of their teeth. They help each other out. But apparently this evening the porch and the snow shovel must have had some irreconcilable differences and in the morning the snow shovel had packed its things, and had left the porch forever. And of course, that very afternoon, it snowed. So I went to the garage and introduced the porch to my hole-digging shovel. She wasn't all that interested.

We live in the city and sometimes not everything that makes its way to the porch stays there. People steal strange stuff from our porch all the time. Last year my friend dropped off a pound of whole coffee beans and in the 2 hours it took for me to get home, someone had stolen it off the front porch. It made me wonder about the street value of a kilo of Ethiopian Yergicheffe and if I had been so naive that I was unaware of the yuppies driving through inner city neighborhoods trying to score some cheap beans. Maybe I could find my stolen coffee in an alley or the back of a full size van with no windows and then rebuy it at a fraction of its value. I imagined a tough looking dude smoking a cigarette opening a large trench coat and showing me a selection of fine coffees sewn into the lining. I then envisioned a group of wayward young men, coming together after a long day of thieving and showing each other their loot and then French pressing a little of the beans to check the purity and quality. Whoever got the coffee, I hope they enjoyed it.

Then there are the flowerpots. For some reason, the flowerpot fairy seems to be unusually active on my street. Apparently 30 pound second-hand gardening notions attract thieves like a black Labrador to a drooly tennis ball. Sometimes we assume mutual exclusivity in ethics and aesthetics but outdoor decor and banditry often allide. I guess it would behoove us to remember that Martha Stewart is the queen of the gardener thieves. Every one of my neighbors has had their flower pots jacked at one time or another. My neighbor Greg is always asking me questions when I do yard work in the spring, "You're not going to put those flowers in that pot for everyone to see are you??" and "Those solar powered path lights are nice. You're not going to put them on the path to your house are you? Somebody stole mine two years ago." It seems like a lot of risk for a small payoff I guess. Most of the flowerpots are worth 10 bucks or less new. But people seem comfortable taking big risks for small payoffs around here. It's almost admirable - like an extreme sport.

But it can be annoying too. I always have to give special instructions to company's when we mail order stuff. One time our kitchen mixer broke and they sent us another one in the mail. I asked them to try and deliver it when I was home. The lady was from Iowa and she told me, in that Mrs. Poole voice, "Oh you worry too much, No one's going to steal your mixer hun'" I didn't take comfort in her guarantee. And no one called me about the delivery.

There are some rules in the hood that everyone follows. And high on this list is the don't let the whole neighborhood know that you've got a brand new 300 dollar mixer on your front porch. A stainless steel Kitchen Aid mixer sat for 8 hours on my front porch and no one touched it. It was one of those fancy mixers with optional attachments that no one ever buys - the kind that people register for when they get married and proudly display on the single square foot of kitchen counter in their studio apartment while they are in graduate school. The packaging had a large full size glossy color image of the mixer on the front and the Fed Ex dude hadn't even hidden it behind the railing. It sat there in plain view, on a sunny weekday for all to see. For some reason, it didn't meet the criteria of the thieves in my neighborhood that day but I'd like to think the porch was looking out for me - this time.

In the absence of my blue, low-quality, Chinese snow shovel, I began to wonder, "Why would someone naturally averse to work, steal a snow shovel at all?" Snow shovels are almost a symbol of hard work in the Upper Midwest. Mystery upon Mystery. I guess it tells us something about people - Sometimes we miss the good stuff and take the junk instead. Time to buy another 8 dollar blue snowshovel.