Things happen when I go out of town. No kidding.

While I was gone to Utah recently, a GFI (?) switch in the garage popped out. This caused everything electrical in the garage, and also the ground lanterns on the outside of the west garage wall, to stop working.

Such a thing is not good. Worse is that no one knew it happened.

All anyone knew--anyone being Lola--was that something was wrong with the freezer. Tuesday, April 29, she texted me that my old freezer had finally died. And it looked to her like almost everything in it would be lost, unsalvageable.

Distressing news. I could replace the food, and I knew that some of it should be thrown out anyway because of its age, but I began to wonder what a person does with a big upright freezer that is kaputz. When Andrew called a day or two later, he said he thought the garbage guys would pick it up. He would look into that.

Meanwhile, Lola said she would empty the freezer Wednesday night and get the stuff out for the trash pickup Thursday morning. Wow, I thought, that's a big job, and I told her so. She said not so big.

I thought, "Sure saves me from a nasty job when I get home."

I don't quite remember when she told me the fridge in the garage had also stopped working.

Hmmm. Maybe the freezer didn't die. Maybe the power went out.

But when she checked the circuit breakers and found none tripped, we had a real puzzle. How could this be?

I called the sprinkler guy and told him my mower guy had reset the sprinkler controls and I asked if that could cause a power failure. No way. It uses only about 1 amp, he said. He mentioned a GFI switch. Was there one on the outlet where the two appliances were plugged in?

No.

But then I remembered the one on the east wall of the garage. It had popped out once before, mysteriously, and caused a similar problem in the garage. That time I asked my neighbor for help. He headed me toward that switch and all was fixed.

So I told Lola to go across the garage, see if that switch was out and, if so, push it in. She did. It was. And pushing it in fixed everything. I texted Andrew not to worry. Happy ending.

Except that the food in the freezer and the fridge was spoiled. I told Lola to throw it all out or to use her judgment about it. She did and left the now-empty freezer unplugged so all the accumulated ice would thaw.

When I got home, May 3) all I had to do was wipe out the freezer. Now it's like new. And that means empty.

But here's something--and it may be why I write this in the first place. It's about the box of Mrs Cavanaugh's chocolates my mother gave me in 1979, not long before she died, the last thing she gave me in her life. I was never able to eat it or throw it out. I told Lola to throw it out. That would save me having to do the hard thing.

But when I got home I discovered that she had kept it, saved it from its own death.

I hardly knew what to think, but I must admit to feeling some relief when I discovered it. Purely sentimental, maybe silly. But there you go.