well bust my buffers!

There's a lady named Dawn who lives in the building across the street from us. The first time I met her, last spring, she came over to our stoop while I was sitting outside with the boys and introduced herself. Apparently she'd often watched us from her window and she just found herself interested in meeting me. She's really nice, but our acquaintance never really blossomed beyond saying hello when we happened to bump into each other.

Last week, for the first time in several months, we ran into each other again. Actually, she sort of chased me down from half a block away as the boys and I were out on an errand. She'd been hoping to see me again, she told me, because she'd just purchased a train table as a gift for her boyfriend to use to display his model trains. But they only wanted the table, not the set of trains that came with it, and would my boys be interested in taking them off their hands? It was just some tracks and a few trains to go on them, she told me, but she wanted to make sure they went to a home where they would get good use, and she thought that perhaps by boys would enjoy them.

Would they ever! I thanked her for her unprecedented generosity, and we arranged a time for her to give us the trains. That time was yesterday. We swung by her building on our way home from church to pick them up. The three small boxes she handed over to us turned out to be an enormous amount of tracks, trains, and accessories large and small. In one sweet, swift movement, she more than doubled our already fairly large collection of trains.

So her generosity was not only unprecedented, it was overwhelming. Dawn's name is now spoken with a sort of awed reverence at our house, which is fitting since all three of the boys (yes, even Matthew!) are in absolute heaven.