It doesn't take much to make a usually deadpan old guy break into a big smile and think that  Christmas maybe has come early this year. We moved out more stuff this weekend including 2 large furniture items that had become problematic. One item finally was picked up as a freebie on the curb after sitting there overnight. Ah, the curb give-away hardly ever fails. However, we had a corner desk and hutch that were too large and heavy to make it to the curb, and through a garage sale, a Craigslist ad, a charitable donation attempt, and by word of mouth, no one seemed to want it.

When we bought it, I had to haul it inside in pieces and put it together. When we hauled it out into the garage to sell, I had to dismantle it again to get it out of the house and then put it back together in the garage for show and tell. But it sat in the garage blocking traffic and preventing us from using the garage as a garage. It mocked me every time I walked by it. It was more than an albatross; it was the great white whale. It was the thing that went bump in my dreams every night. It reached out to me every time I was in the garage and said, "you'll never get rid of me."

Desperate times call for desperate measures someone once said, and having less than 2 weeks to go before we vacated the house made for desperate times. So, it was Craigslist again but this time listed under free stuff. Not more than 10 minutes after posting the ad, I received an e-mail request. Shortly thereafter a flood of emails came in wanting to take the desk and hutch off my hands. I hadn't realized what a valuable commodity I was sitting on. The person who picked it up, showed up in a station wagon, and, you guessed it, took it all apart to get both the desk and hutch in the back of the car. He was very pleased and left with a big smile on his face. However, the bigger smile was on the face of that old guy standing in the driveway watching that station wagon pull out into the street. Yes, sometimes it doesn't take much to bring great joy.