The Why of "The Shovel's in the trunk" as my title

Those words, "the shovel's in the trunk", were uttered to me by my daughter when she was 12 years old. I had just bought this piece of land, my one acre on the lake. The house was under construction. I was back and forth between College Park and Ruckersville watching over and taking care of making this place HOME. One thing I had to have was a mailbox, that had to be put into the ground on the opposite side of the road, at a certain height so the mail person can do their thing. There was much shopping to be done. I think we spent 2 hours at Lowes. One of the things we bought was a shovel. And we bought it because we thought it a good thing to have around the house. (I left 4-5 good shovels at 9500 Narragansett Parkway, darn it, the shed with a tree sticking out of it at the moment, but that is another blog topic.) We shopped and got every thing we could possibly imagine that we needed in this new home.

Later that afternoon we decided to do the last necessary task, put the US Postal Service specified type of post and box into the ground (so the bills could be delivered, mostly). It was stinking hot and humid. We were tired and cranky. Assembling the mail box was a pain in the butt enough. And then attaching it to the post. Then it comes time to put the post into the ground and my ex and I are suddenly clueless. How are we going to get that post into the concrete they call soil here? We were sniping at each other. It was as ugly as we have ever been with each other.
Leanne had been standing there watching us struggle, only because there was no place else for her to be. She was unusually patient and quiet. She stood back and watched us stress out, flip out and treat each other badly. (She was likely afraid to speak, I might have ripped her head off at that point for no reason at all.)

Finally she quietly said "the shovel's in the trunk". We were so caught up in our frustration and exhaustion and being nasty to each other for no good reason that we overlooked the most obvious of all. We had spent a bit more time than was likely necessary picking out that stupid shovel, and then totally forgot that we bought it in the first place and it was right there, the one tool we needed, in the trunk of the car, with all the other crap we bought.

To me it resonates not so much because of what she said, but how she just let us be idiots, how patient she was. Maybe she was laughing at us inside (I hope so). He and I ended up sitting there laughing at ourselves and thanking her for being smarter and kinder than us.

"The shovel's in the trunk" is now what Leanne and I say to each other when once of us gets mindless, thoughtless or misses the obvious.

Lesson learned.