Reverse Porch Piracy

Dearest Rachel –

There are neighborhoods that have problems with what I understand are referred to as ‘porch pirates,’ and while I can’t imagine that being an issue in a relatively affluent and homogeneous socioeconomic area as ours, I get the driving force behind it. Covetousness is a thing that exists (otherwise, why would there be a commandment against it?), and in a place where poverty or need were rife, the temptation of something just sitting there unattended on someone’s porch might easily overcome one’s scruples regarding what obviously belongs to someone else. They aren’t aware of it, or they would have brought it inside already, right? They wouldn’t miss what they never knew they had, I expect the reasoning to go.

We, on the other hand, have very much the opposite problem (if you can call it that; and I do, for reasons that I promise I’ll get around to explaining soon enough). For whatever reason, we keep finding stuff on our porch from whence we have no idea. You’ll remember the deliveries we received late in 2020 for the mysterious Bryan Hamilton – including the phone interrogations you had to make in order to clear the charges once they finally did appear on our credit card, as well as trying to return the items we received; we were eventually told to keep it all, at which point we made a weird little Christmas out of opening everything with Kerstin. Did you know that her daughter Ashley still has the Kalimba she received from that collection of strangeness? She apparently taught herself to play it, and still uses it from time to time in compositions, I gather.

Likewise, I’ve told you about the still-unsolved bouquets that I’ve found hanging on our door at the beginning of the first couple of Mays after your departure. One of your friends, while insisting it wasn’t her, acknowledges that she knows the culprit, but claims that whoever they are, they don’t want to be identified. So I’ve let the matter drop; and since making the inquiries in the first place, they haven’t appeared since. I suppose that’s the price paid for probing too deeply into a matter; but I just had to know. Not that I do even now, but for very different reasons.

To be sure, there are days when I’m surprised by something arrives on our porch that I don’t recognize, but on further inspection, there’s a mailer tag on it indicating that it’s to be delivered to Daniel or Logan. While still unexpected as far as I’m concerned, this is just normal life when multiple people under the same roof happen to have separate Amazon accounts (or wherever they buy their stuff from). What I’m talking about is different from that.

Saturday night had me returning from church and a local pizza chain (Daniel had been in the mood for “a generic pepperoni pizza,” as he put it. Were it not for the fact that the Costco across the street from church closes only a few minutes before the service lets out, that would have been his first choice – again, an odd choice for him, but I get the whole idea of ‘jonesing’ for something specific, even like that – but as it wasn’t an option, I had to go past the house to the local Little Caesar’s) to find Daniel out on the porch, dragging several boxes inside. It so happened that, in his attempt to meet me at the door to collect his dinner, he almost stumbled across the items pictured below:

And it’s not like we could have kept any of this stuff; none of this was ours. We hadn’t ordered it from Costco; this belonged to somebody else.  But who?

Our first thought – and this should be amusing to you – was to immediately get on the group text chat, and ask any of the girls if they had been pranking us for some reason.  Yes, our first instinct was that this was a prank, as opposed to being a simple missed delivery. Weird, huh? Granted, it would also give them a bit of a heads-up if any of them wanted some of this stuff – after all, we weren’t going to be able to use all of it, and the fact that this was mostly organic stuff suggests that this was a fairly pricey haul.  It really shouldn’t go to waste.

But after a couple of hours of this sitting in the back of my mind, it occurred to me that we used to get deliveries every now and then for the house on the opposite side of Campbell Street – our town’s north-south dividing line.  It wouldn’t be right to offer this to the girls – or use it for ourselves – when we should be delivering it to the people it belonged to.  So we piled it all into the back of the car (that’s when I took the picture you see, and why the picture indicates that it was late at night, because it was by then), and try to drive it up to where we thought the delivery was supposed to be made to.

It isn’t easy to see house numbers on our street, though, and the fact that it’s a major thoroughfare poses a problem when we’re trying to peer at the street numbers.  We actually had to have our hazard lights on while we drove at about half the posted speed limit in order to do so. But we did manage to find the house and pull into their driveway – almost by accident, as we pulled into one at random and it just so happened to be the very house we were looking for. There was but one light on in the house, and for a while we worried that it might be somebody leaving a light on to suggest that someone was home, rather than someone actually being home (in order to ward off potential home invaders), as no one was coming to the door. However, when I leaned over to look into the window, I saw movement in the lighted room, and rapped as forcefully as I could (without running the risk of breaking the glass) in order to get the attention of the room’s occupant.

He came to the door, we asked him about a Costco delivery he was expecting, and he gave us a look that we recognized on each other when we first stared at the boxes; it was clear he had no idea what we were talking about. We showed him to the car, and indicated the goods that we had received, and he continued to disavow having placed such an order. However, at our insistence, he took in a few things; he was more than happy to take the blueberries, the raspberries and the strawberries (that first, I wouldn’t miss, but I was almost reluctant to give up the other two.  Still, I had made the offer, and I wasn’t about to seem churlish by going back on my word).  Everything else was ours to dispose of, as far as he was concerned.

So we brought it all back to the house, reiterated our offer to the girls, and while several of them expressed some interest in one or another thing, there’s a certain aspect of ‘first come first served’ness to the whole situation. Kerstin showed up at the house, and was willing to take just about everything that we weren’t interested in. So I informed the other two about the situation, and how they didn’t need to bother coming over to claim anything, because basically everything had a home now, apart from the bottled water (but who can’t find a use for that? Besides, it’s not as if the stuff goes bad or anything).

It’s still yet another mystery for us to deal with, but as long as their rightful owner doesn’t show up to claim it, everything works out in our favor. Even the fact that somebody must have ordered this from Costco, and not gotten their delivery, just means that they can probably claim that the order hadn’t arrived, and Costco has to basically eat the mistake. We’d have loved to have helped them out by getting it to the right person, but at this point, we have no idea who that right person is. I’d like to say that we’ve done our due diligence to the best of our ability; now we sort of have the right to use what they’ve left us, however inadvertently, before it goes bad.  We’re not trying to be porch pirates, but when stuff gets left with us, what are we supposed to do?

Anyway, that was the eventful part of our weekend. Hope it amused you as much as it did us, but in the meantime, keep an eye on us, and wish us luck. We’re going to need it.