The Story of Our Door Mat...

Our door mat's name is Mary.

We named her after our only friendly neighbor in Overland Park. When we were moving into our one bedroom apartment almost three years ago, Mary was just watching us. At first I thought she was kind of creepy. I mean, didn't she have any thing better to do than watch us unload our Budget van? Soon after though, we got acquainted and we began to love Mary.

She was retired, lonely and probably almost 80 years old. She was the neighbor who I borrowed sugar from. She had a really eclectic apartment, and every time I would walk inside, I just wanted to browse. There were different colors of non matching furniture, pictures from the seventies, and tons of old magazines and newspapers laying around. About ten months after we moved in, Mary announced to us that she was moving. She said, "in the three years I have lived here, you two were the only ones who talked to me." She wanted to move to a place where there were other old folks who would want to play cards and knit with. We were sad, but understood. But crap, who was I going to borrow sugar from?

So the day came, and we said good bye, and Mary was on to bigger and better things. We didn't exchange any contact information or anything. But we did notice that she left her door mat behind, and then we also noticed that we never bought a door mat. Travis and I looked at each other and decided that Mary would want us to have it. So we snatched it and it has been ours for almost two lovely years.

Like I said, we call the door mat Mary because we think it has a part of Mary in it. Every so often we will find it trying to crawl back to the real Mary. After big storms (actually probably just a light breeze), Mary will be located ten feet down the street, or sometimes we will find her all curled up and we will just laugh and say, "Mary, what do you think you are doing?" We will never give up on our door mat because we never want to forget the original owner. Who knows, she could even be dead right now, but her memory lives on right on our doorstep. I just hope Mary (the door mat) survives this week, lots of storms a coming our way.