Purposeful Coincidence

Right before I stepped into the kitchen I felt a very gentle flay-like energy go through my ears. Then there was a nudge in my heart to go and answer the front door. “I just came out of the living room”, I thought to myself.

I turned around and headed back into the living room. As I reached to open the front door, before stepping out I noticed a small black notebook sitting on the doorstep. I knelt down to pick it up. “Who could’ve left this here?” I thought to myself. I stuck my head out of the door to see if I could see anyone walking off but I saw no one.

I stepped back into the house and closed the door. I looked down at the little black book and noticed there was no title on the front of the cover nor was there any information of the book belonging to anyone.

On the first page of the notebook, I recognize the name written in cursive “Birchery Street” Birchery Street is the street I lived on since I was a little child raised by my grandparents. Since my grandfather passed, my grandmother and I have lived in the same house on Birchery Street.

I turned to the second page in the notebook, there was a sketch of a door. The page after that was the word “Unlock” written in cursive.

As I held the book in my hand, a flashback of a dream I had the night before popped up in my head. In the dream, my grandfather and I were having a conversation. I remembered my grandfather telling me in the dream “Your destiny is on the way.”

Flipping through the last few pages in the notebook, there were sketches of a key, a window, a round button, the back of a man's bald head that was slightly turned to the left. There was also a sketch of the backs of a man and a child figure standing beside one another. The man figure was lightly shaded within its figure and the small child figure was heavily shaded within its figure. In the sketch, the man is looking down on the small child and holding the child's hand.

I flipped to the very last page of the small black notebook, there was a beautiful sketch of a bare oak tree with words written in cursive underneath “What color is the brown box?” As I read the cursive writing underneath the sketch, an image of my grandfather's old toolbox popped up in my head.

I walked into the kitchen where my grandmother was sitting sipping from a cup of tea. I sat down next to her and showed her the small black notebook. I explained to my grandmother how the notebook was randomly left on the front doorstep.

“Would you have any idea of what was inside Grandpa's toolbox?” “ Why did he call it his red toolbox when it was obviously a wooden brown box?” I asked my grandmother. My grandmother responded, “Dear no one knows, and neither will anyone ever know what your grandfather kept in that toolbox.”

I remember whenever family and friends would visit my grandfather would ask my grandmother or for me to bring him his red toolbox and we would bring him a wooden brown box. Family and friends would laugh and whisper that grandfather was losing it.

“Why did you throw grandpa’s toolbox away the day you caught me playing with his tools and sent me in the house,” I asked? “I didn't want you to hurt yourself,” Grandmother said. “I was hurt, your Grandfather left without me and it frustrated me that I could never get that toolbox to open. So I saw no point in keeping it” my grandmother said.

My grandmother stared out the kitchen window at the oak tree in the backyard. “Every day I regret throwing that toolbox out” She uttered under her breath. I looked at my grandmother and told her that I had a confession. My grandmother looked from the kitchen window and turned to look at me.

“Grandma I went behind your back when you told me not to go meddling in grandpa's tools. When you had your back turned I took grandpa's toolbox from the trash and climbed up the treehouse and kept it there so you wouldn't throw it away again.”

My grandmother smiled so big I haven't seen a smile on her face the way she was smiling at me since grandpa passed. My Grandmother demanded that I show her grandfather's toolbox from the treehouse.

My grandmother and I walked out the back door to the treehouse. I climbed up the little ladder that led up to the treehouse.

Like a bird, I stuck my head through the little doorway of the treehouse. There were tiny piles of scrap wood blocks laying all over the inside. I could barely fit inside the small treehouse. From my head down to my waist was about as far as I was going to get inside the treehouse.

I began to search for the toolbox with my hands and with the help of my arms scrambling through the little blocks of wood inside the treehouse. My grandmother yelled out “Are you OK?” I yelled back to my grandmother “I’m fine!”

As I searched for the toolbox. I noticed a red tail sticking out from beneath a small pile of wood in a corner of the treehouse. I pulled the red tail from the woodpile, discovering the red tail was my old blanket from my childhood.

A loud “THUD” startled me. My grandfather's brown wooden toolbox rolled out from underneath the blanket. I reached out and pulled the toolbox close to my chest. Holding the toolbox in my right hand at my chest, I safely pushed myself out of the little door of the treehouse holding onto the ladder with my left hand to climb down.

My grandmother had that big smile on her face again. And said to me “Is that it?” I walked up to my grandmother and said “It is.”

I reached down with my left hand to grab my grandmother's right hand. We walked towards the porch swing to sit down. As we sat down, we both looked at the toolbox that was sitting in my lap.

“I looked for that key for many years as I had already thrown out that toolbox, I thought if only I would find the key I would have him again,” my grandmother said while staring at the toolbox in my lap. “He cherished that old box for the life of him” She added.

I remember the day of my grandfather's repast, I saw my grandfather's brown hat with a missing button on the side sitting on top of the kitchen counter. I hopped up to grab the brown hat from the counter and as I grabbed it, a small silver key fell out of the hat and onto the floor. I went to pick the key up from off the floor and I stuck it in my pocket.

“As a matter of…” I leaned over to the side and dug down in my pants pocket and pulled out my car keys. “...fact,” I said! Searching through the jangling car keys. I spotted the smallest key on my car keys that belonged to my grandfather's toolbox. I went to stick the small key into the keyway of the toolbox. The key would not go into the keyway. I pushed and forced the key to go into the keyway but it would not go in.

I told my grandmother how my grandfather would pull the key from his hat and turn his back to open his toolbox and once he got the toolbox opened he would say “Tada, the magic key has opened the unmagic box”. The day I took my grandfather's toolbox out the trash. I tried opening the toolbox with the same key from grandfather's hat several times after grandfather passed. I told her that I had given up and forgot all about my grandfather's toolbox.

“What should we do with the toolbox if we can't get into it'' My grandmother asked?

My grandmother stood up from the swing and walked toward the back door to go inside the house. Before she took a step into the house. She turned around to look at me and said “Come and put the toolbox back into the kitchen windowsill where he would have wanted it.”

I stood up from the porch swing and followed my grandmother into the house. As I stood in front of the kitchen window to place the toolbox in the windowsill above the kitchen sink, I tilted the toolbox away from me and towards the window holding the sides of the toolbox. I stared down at the wooden box my grandfather built into a toolbox.

As I stared, at the toolbox, a sunbeam from the sun through the kitchen window hit my right eye and then hit something shiny from underneath the rectangular-shaped wooden toolbox handle. I went to lift the toolbox up close to my face, with the toolbox slightly tilted away from my face to get a better look underneath the handle of the toolbox. I saw something sticking out from underneath. I went to glide and trace my fingers underneath the handle, whatever it was that I was feeling underneath was hard and pointy with grooves and I could tell there was tape over it keeping it held inside underneath the toolbox handle. I took a butter knife from the kitchen drawer to use to scratch and scrape the tape away. I put my fingers underneath to pick and to pull until something underneath finally began to lift from the tape. As I tried to pull with my fingertips, something fell from between my fingers and onto the kitchen floor. As I bent down to pick up what fell on the floor laying face down with an old piece of gray duct tape stuck to It was a small gold key.

I turned around and looked at my grandmother. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cracked smile on her face. I couldn't tell if she was smiling or if she was about to cry. I walked over to her and leaned over to hug her. I placed the toolbox on top of the kitchen table in between my grandmother and myself. I sat down in a chair next to her. I removed the tape from the small gold key and stuck the key inside of the keyway of the toolbox. I closed my eyes and prayed to myself “Please be the magic key” as I turned the key to the right… “CLINK” the toolbox unlocked. With my chest pounding, I pulled the top of the wooden box cover open. There was a red flat steel storage box inside. I reached inside of the toolbox “CLINK CLINK” As I unfastened the two latches, the top cover of the red steel storage box popped open.

My grandmother and I looked down at the opened red storage box. We couldn't believe what our eyes were seeing. There were four stacks of cash. I counted one stack at a time. There was a total of $20,000 in the red steel storage box inside of my grandfather's brown wooden toolbox.

Underneath the cash at the bottom floor of the red storage box, there was a letter from my Grandfather written in cursive just like the cursive that was written in the small black notebook. The letter read “There is a day when everything will make perfect sense. Despite the confusion, you should always remember that everything happens for a reason.

Until we meet again

LoveGrandpa,”