Re-Paying it Forward

It was a warm June afternoon, and the three of us girls lay draped out across the living room with the house's main door wide open. Every window throughout the house was propped up in its wooden sill and the fans were on high. I was perched cross-legged on the thick arm of our blue carpet couch, watching two kittens playing in the middle of the room.

"I'm so glad you got Jasper!" I exclaimed to Ellen after watching her eight-week-old kitten tumble over mine.

At the call center where I worked full time, my co-worker Tabitha had mentioned her cat was having kittens, and she spent a few weeks trying to persuade me to take one off her hands. I kept saying I could not afford a pet, but I stopped at Tab's place just to take a quick look at them after work and ended up leaving with Keen. I mentioned the kittens to Ellen, and we became cat moms together. Her's she named Jasper, and mine was Keen.

Autumn sat in front of the door, redirecting the kittens if they got too close to escaping. We heard the sound of a large vehicle coming to a stop outside. Autumn leaned back and craned her neck toward the neighbor's yard.

"It's the moving van again! I wonder if they'll be doing tours of the interior when they put that house on the market? I really want to see the inside," Autumn remarked.

"You should just go over there and ask if you can check it out," I responded.

Autumn glanced over at me. The house next door had been abandoned when I moved to the neighborhood at the beginning of the year. Five of us roommates lived in this four-bedroom house in the residential downtown section of Holland, Michigan, the same small town in which Autumn grew up. Autumn had rented the house with college friends for the last couple of years while commuting to her campus. I decided to move to Holland following a harsh break-up which left me with hardly any resources and a pile of credit card debt - not my own credit card debt. Autumn created the opportunity for me to move in when one of her previous roommates moved out. I was the fifth person in the house, a floater, as I had not signed the lease.

Autumn and I shared her bedroom on the second level. Autumn's queen-sized mattress lay on the floor in one corner, and I slept on the air mattress that I bought on sale in the other corner. Above our heads, three large windows let in natural light which helped me use the room as a classroom while I worked to finish my college degree online. Our room did not have a vent for central air like the rest of the house, so over the past winter, we had used a space heater to keep warm. During those winter months, nights had been frigid as the air inside my mattress always matched the temperature of the room. The big windows were pretty but drafty, and the space heater could only do so much. I was currently relishing in the warmth of these summer evenings.

This weekend, we also had Ellen's air mattress crammed into our room. She had come down to visit after her school released for the summer. Ellen was now an elementary school teacher in Petoskey, about three hours north of Holland. She and I had met several summers before in the Upper Peninsula, while she was still in college at Lake State. Both of us had worked for a small, touristy ice cream shop right next to the Soo Locks. I had grown up there, in the countryside just outside of town, and Ellen's apartment across from downtown was an ideal place to crash on the weekends. Several years later, and several towns later, we were still close friends.

"Well, I guess it wouldn't hurt to try," Autumn shrugged and stood. "I'm going to check it out." She gently closed the door behind her as she left, and I swooped down to pick up Keen.

"Oh baby, you so cute! You a cute little baby kitty!" I cooed at him as if I were his mother. My heart swelled with joy; I was surrounded by people who loved and supported me, and I had a kitten to cuddle. It was a beautiful day outside, what more did I need than what I already had?

"Hey Abi, want a mattress?" Autumn poked her head in and asked me.

"What?" I questioned her, then laughed. "What are you talking about?"

"The house next door has like five mattresses and frames on the front porch right now that they are just throwing away. They said we can feel free to take them. I thought you might want one," she informed me.

"Well, um, that sounds... really cool. Actually, that's great! Yeah, I'll go talk to them!" I exclaimed.

Blessings come in all shapes and sizes, and some unexpectedly. That day I was surprised with a gift in a time of need. The people next door had no idea I was sleeping on an air mattress and that my roommate had no bed frame, how could they? But they offered up something that made a major difference in my living conditions.

Autumn moved out the following spring when she finished her college degree, and a few months after that I moved myself and Keen to a small, new apartment. The old pink mattress had served me well, but by that point, the hammock in the middle of it could have been strung up between two trees. I had paid off my credit cards and even saved up a bit of money, so I splurged and bought myself a brand new bed. I decided to take the frame to a thrift store to be reused, and right as I walked in I overheard a mother asking the attendant where she could find a twin-sized bed frame for her son.

Once again, that bed frame was paid forward.