I’d like to share with you something which brings me a tiny bit of joy every morning:
Yep, it’s a key. A key sitting on a stump. It isn’t my stump, nor is it my key. Instead, it is located several blocks from my house along the route I often take when walking my dogs at six every morning.
I don’t know what the key is for, although I suspect it unlocks the fence gate which leads into a back yard. What’s heartening to me is that the key is always there, out there for anyone to take or use. The thing is, though, no one touches it except, I would suppose, the owner from time to time.
It isn’t under a fake-looking plastic rock. It isn’t tucked way up high where no one can see it. Nope, it’s just sitting on a stump, right there in front of God and everybody, constant and undisturbed.
We live in a chaotic, unpredictable, and dangerous world. I am grateful to walk my dogs every morning in a place where I know something as simple, and as easy to steal, as a key to a lock can be left out, which to me as a statement from the owner that he trusts his neighbors and that his neighbors, in turn, show through their inaction that they are worthy of that trust.
