Let's Write is a program offered by retired English teacher, John Philips. A good group gets together on Monday afternoons to receive inspiration for writing and then they share their stories.

Here's one that was written by Lydia Ehmcke.

AN APARTMENT WITH CONVENIENCES

One nice Spring morning I felt like taking the lawn furniture out of the shed and putting it on the patio. The sky was blue, the sun was
shinning and winter was finally over.

When I opened the door of the shed, after 6 months of winter, an awful smell wafted towards me and I had to hold my nose. I had to find the source of the smell and quickly. May be there is a dead animal in here, I thought and started my chores.

First I took the table and garden chairs out. They looked pretty clean, since I had cleaned them in the fall before putting them away. I noticed that the plastic cushion for the lounge chair had a hole in it and lots of the stuffing was missing. Well, it really was all over the place. Since we store other things like wooden boxes, barbeque and the odd pail in there. I had a lot of moving and shaking to do. I took out most of the things and swept the floor. The smell was still strong, so more things had to be investigated.

To my great surprise, I found a wooden coca-cola box, with six compartments for six big bottles standing up on it's side. Each compartment was filled with grass, paper strips and foam pieces from my lounge chair cushion. It looked like an apartment house with a little nest in each of the compartments. I laughed out loud, when I cleaned it out and thought: "How cleaver:" and pretty neat. Sorry to say, I forgot to take a picture of it. It would have been interesting to show it to my family and see their reaction. But that wasn't where the smell came from, so my search was not over. Then I found a pail, about a quarter full of foam chips (or so it seemed) and when I wanted to dump them into the garbage bag I realized that there were not just foam chips in that pail , but it held liquid underneath the top layer, because it spilled all over the garbage bag and my feet. What a mess! I had a lot of cleaning up to do and finally realized where the smell came from. My little chipmunks had not just found a cheap but comfortable apartment for the winter, but also a pail nearby to wee-wee in. The liquid was covered neatly with a layer of foam clips. When I had laughed out loud discovering their apartment house, I was now in awe. In my mind I tried to picture the little creatures going to the bathroom on this 14 inch high pail with out falling in. It was short of a miracle. There was nothing on the floor or in any other container. It was a lot of work cleaning up after them, but i still marvel at their ingenuity.

L.E. APRIL 2010