A Story of Milk

Nowadays, my horses live on a dairy farm. Among the many reasons I enjoy having them there, is the free access to fresh milk. I bring my milk jugs, set them on the counter and when the cows are milked, someone fills my jugs. I leave $4.50 a gallon on the counter and I take my milk home. It's comforting to know that I can run to the farm at anytime to get my daughter milk. How odd is it to be comforted by an endless supply of milk?

When R and I broke up, he finally left us in the middle of the night, the night before grocery day just after dropping L off to her mother. He disappeared without a word, left me with no money, a fairly empty fridge, and an uninspected and unregistered car with an empty gas tank. He wouldn't answer his phone. When I realized he wasn't coming back, I began to panic because while we had some food, we did not have what my daughter always wanted, milk. I checked my bank account, but my $75 check from free lance work had been transferred to R's account shorty after being deposited, just as I had scheduled. I cleaned the house from top to bottom, searched pants pockets and the laundry coin jar. I scrounged up $6 and some change to get milk.

I packed my daughter and our change into the uninspected and unregistered car with the gas tank gauge on e and prayed that it would make it to the gas station. It did. I had planned to put $3.50 in gas in the car so we could make it home, but ran over by accident. We still had enough for a half gallon of milk. I grabbed our half gallon and set it on the counter, the cashier rang it up with the gas and when tax was figured in, I just did not have enough money and I wanted to cry. All this for a half gallon of milk and I had pumped too much gas to get what we had really come for. Just then a stranger put change down on the counter and covered the rest of our purchase, same as I had done for another stranger not that long ago. I thanked him with tears in my eyes and left holding my baby girl and her half gallon of milk.

When something happens that drastically changes your life, you learn to be comforted by the little things, such as a half gallon of milk in the fridge. Thank God for kind strangers.

#thankyoustranger #russelllanpher #rustylanpher #russelllanpheriii #russtylanpherstetsonmaine russell rusty lanpher iii stetson maine bangor maine bucksport maine