Nailed It

During a challenging season in my life, I was blessed to have a furry, four-legged companion named Otis, a Lhasa apso, who was intermittently the most wonderful creature God ever made and the biggest pain in the ass that ever lived. Otis got away with a lot of shenanigans because he was insanely cute.

Having a dog forced me to go on regular walks in my neighborhood several times a day, rain or shine. Among the usual debris on my tree-lined street, there were always a lot of small matchstick-size twigs. After a while I began to spot old nails in those piles of twigs; they looked identical. And over time I seemed to acquire a special talent for distinguishing the dangerous from the debris, something my neighbors, who never saw what I did, marveled at.

Not wanting anyone to drive over a nail and have a blowout, I always picked the nails up, believing it was a good deed that would pay off in tire-protection karma for myself. I would put them in my pocket (some as big as pencils!) and when I got home, drop them like souvenirs into a pretty bowl.

But as the events of my life that season got more difficult, I sensed that there was something more to finding rusty nails in the street than just good citizenship. It seemed like they always appeared on my worst days, when I was feeling sad, lost, or hopeless. Not much on coincidence, I came to believe a comforting message was being delivered when I saw a nail in the street: God wanted me to know he was there. It was his way of showing up in the middle of the ordinary, in a pile of debris, and no matter what I was going through, I could count on him protecting me from having a blowout over it.

I still have that bowl of nails, and now that Otis is gone it reminds me of the reassurance I not only received during a tough time, but eventually started looking for whenever my dog and I went for a walk. These days when I find a nail in the street, it’s like bumping into an old friend, or hearing my favorite love song from back in the day, and I am reminded that if we just open our eyes to look for it, love is always there, even when everything around it is trash.