One of the nicest surprises we ever had was when we returned from settlement on this current location of the Lazy 'C' Ranch in 1999 and found that my sister had gone to Cracker Barrel, bought two of their famous rocking chairs, and placed them on our porch as a housewarming gift! They're still there, and I think of her kindness every time I go out on the porch to look for the newspaper. Peggy sits outside every morning on one of them, drinking coffee and watching the passing spectacle.
A couple down New Mexico way got an opposite surprise not long ago, but things turned out ok. Conrad Duran and his lady friend Andrea share a house in Albuquerque. On Christmas Eve, he spotted a pair of old old rockers (not Ted Nugent and Eric Clapton, the kind you sit on) tossed out on the curb near their place. Conrad hauled them home and left them back by the garage, planning to take them inside to refurbish them once the holidays were over.
By the way, the word "furbish," meaning "to give a fresh look to something old and shabby," works just as well here, but no one ever gives it a chance. Maybe we can furbish "furbish." "Refurbish" would then mean the second time we slap paint on an old chair.
Anyway, Conrad never had the chance to furbish the chairs. Someone ripped them off. "I just grabbed them and left them outside of my garage door which is really not that close to the curb, then I had to go to work," Duran told KRQE-TV.
It's obvious that he doesn't work for the Albuquerque Tourism Office, because he says he came home from a double shift to the find the chairs as gone as last week's TV Guide. And he went on: "I've gotten a few items stolen from me over the years living here, ever since I moved here," Duran said. "It's one of those things where you come to terms with it."
So off they went, Andrea and Connie, and when they came back, it was a Christmas miracle! When they returned from visiting family over the weekend, there were the chairs, with new coats of paint and new upholstery!
"I thought they had been stolen and lo and behold, they had just taken them, redid them, and returned them as a Christmas gift or something like that," Duran said. "Now they just look absolutely beautiful."
Along with the chairs, Duran found an anonymous note about doing good for others.
And there's our pay-it-forward moment from Christmas 2020. One piece of advice, though: don't go prowling on your neighbors' porches looking for fix-up projects. Just don't.
They may very well have guard cats on duty.
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