It was Magdalena’s lucky day! She had driven to the garden shop to get some petunias. As she pulled into an empty car space she suddenly braked. A shopping trolley had been left carelessly in the parking space. Magdalena backed out and parked in another empty space.
On her way to the shop she thought she would take the trolley and put it in the trolley stand. It was such a nuisance taking up a valuable parking space.
Oh wonder of wonders! Oh rapture! That was the secret trolley. Everyone else had walked past it all day. Magdalena was the one to return it and she got a five hundred dollar shopping voucher from the garden shop. Even a photographer was there to record the event for the local paper!
“I’ve never won anything before,” said Magdalena.
Magdalena got lots of things with her voucher. She got some plants and some seeds, but also some weed killer, and some netting to stop the birds from eating her blueberries. She even got a new hoe to replace the one that had seen better days. And of course, she got a new garden hose. The hose was top of the range! This hose wasn’t going to kink like every other garden hose Magdalena had owned throughout her entire life.
When she got home Magdalena put all her wonderful treasures in the garden shed.
A few days later her little grandson went into the garden shed, drank the weed killer, and died.
(Footnote: Hi everyone – These days, generally speaking, I can use the internet only between midnight and 6 a.m. (New Zealand time). I generally go to bed at 10 p.m. and get up at 5 a.m. (used to be a dairy farmer hence the old rising habit!) However, by the time I’ve made the coffee and read the news, there’s very little time for reading your blogs. Some blogs I can sneak a peek during the day, provided they don’t have many pictures. My own blog is posted and scheduled until mid July 2018 (except for a couple of poems) so I will continue to appear as if I’m posting daily – but in fact my participation in the blogging community is going to be rather limited. So until further notice I’m going to be a pretty secret reader! I enjoy our blogging community and will be fully back as soon as I can – but my daytime internet has a daytime limit, and daytime online work-from-home has to come first. Bruce)