Lightening the Load

One of the main tasks these days is sorting and getting rid of so much stuff. It is therapeutic in some ways, but it’s also telling how I can accumulate in such a short time. (I didn’t go buy all this stuff, some of it was given to me others left.) As I was preparing for the big sale I went through the utility drawer in the kitchen and pulled out all the flashlights that I had but wasn’t using to add to the sale items.

Among them was a hand crank light that I had been given. The small instructions warned that it should be cranked every few months to keep it current and it should be cranked for at least a minute every time. I had been cranking it for a bit before I stopped to read the directions. Then I timed cranking it for a minute. It still had no flicker of light. Into the garbage it went.

A vague thought crossed my mind as I tossed it, the street men that pick through our garbage will wonder what this is. A few days later I was rounding the corner in my residential area, a corner where the street men sort of hang out and I saw a guy sitting there cranking away with a beam of light coming through his hands.

The scene only registered in my head after I passed. I smiled. I was free of something I deemed garbage and this man found it and had the patience to get it working again. Now he had a battery free flash light of his own. It made me happy.