Fridays and Old Ladies

This morning as I was leaving the shack it was already +3C...so awesome.  When I got to Lunenburg it was +5C and the gas prices were at an all time low for the last ten years or so...89 cents a litre.  Huzzah!  Things were looking astonishing. 

When I got out of the car the smell that enveloped me was a smell I remembered from childhood.  It was delicious.  It was that smell we got when the weather had been in the minus thirties for weeks, and then suddenly out of the blue, some warmth hit.  Not really a spring smell, not enough dog shit, but something that lingered in the air and held the aroma of thawing trees and a warm breezes.  Its hard to explain unless you've lived through it, but it is very lovely.  Not that I am in anyway comparing the winters here to the winters in northern Ontario, they were more like the Antarctic, or Mars...

Right after my meeting I scooted back to Bridgewater because I had to do some grocery shopping and banking.  I was just coming out of the grocery store when I ran across an tiny, little old lady who was standing beside her car in the middle of the lane.  In a tremulous voice she asked me if I knew how to back cars up?  When I told her that I did, she asked me if I would be so kind as to back her car into a parking spot for her because she couldn't do it (probably because she wasn't tall enough to be able to see over the steering wheel) and when she got out of the store she wouldn't be able to back out of the spot.  She said normally she drives around and around until she finds a spot where she can just drive into, and then out of, but today she had already driven around for a half hour and couldn't find one.  When I backed it in for her she wanted to give me a Twoonie...so cute.  But the way she was offering it to me was as if she had paid many others for the same service and they actually took it.  Really?  Are there really such shitty people out there who would take money from a senior for backing a car up four feet?  It's a sad, sad world.