The Mytoi Spring Cleanup is scheduled for Saturday, May 12 from 10 a.m. to noon in the garden. All ages are invited to help give the garden a good spring cleaning after a stormy winter. Bring work gloves and rakes. TTOR will provide refreshments.

There are only two more wintertime potluck dinners scheduled at the Chappy Community Center: Wednesday, May 16 and June 6. Call Lynn at 508-627-8222 to sign up to host. A welcome back potluck is scheduled for Wednesday, June 27. Activities get into full swing at the CCC in only six weeks. Applications for sailing and tennis are on the website.

The next time you drive past Gerry Jeffer’s garage you might think that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Over the weekend, dozens of volunteers made a clean sweep of the front yard. Old cars and trucks are now flattened and stacked out back, loose fan belts and radiator hoses have been raked up, the store has been painted inside and truck loads of rubbish have vanished from the property. As the debris was hauled away, one of the surprises revealed is that the UPS shed is actually the back of a box truck backed up against the bank. Gerry was a very resourceful guy.

The Chappy store will re-open on Thursday, May 23 under the management of Katie Kidder and Tom Kent of The Chappy Kitchen. Those who have already sampled their culinary creations will know what delights are in store for the summer. See their website at The Chappy Kitchen. This next era at Gerry’s garage will be a great opportunity to provide services right here on Chappy and avoid (I can’t that believe I’m saying this) a trip to town via the Chappy Ferry.

Among the diverse assortment of vehicles clustered around the store was a copper-colored Chevy pickup with a tan cap backed into the pricker bushes just to the left of the UPS shed. That was the one with a big pine tree laid across it for years. That used to be my truck. About 17 years ago Gerry took it off of my hands. I got it from Allen Slater years before with a worn-out transmission. It got tired of going forwards when it got up to operating temperature. Reverse was great. If I drove it to the fire house for radio check on a summer day I couldn’t make it more than half way back home before it slowed to a crawl and finally a standstill going up the hill past Brine’s Pond. So instead, I would take the woods road up over Sampson Hill driving backwards the whole way.

I got the transmission rebuilt good as new and bought a nice set of tires. I determined that I should get a cap for the bed to protect the ton of odds and ends I always feel compelled to travel with in the back. I inquired carefully of Gerry if he might have an old cap that would fit my truck. Not surprisingly he happened to have one in amongst the poison ivy vines. He helped me flip it over, brush off the spider webs and hornet nests and wrestle it up onto the truck. From past experience I was amazed that he was willing to part with it. I was persistent in offering to pay for it. He refused of course. His only condition was that I return it when I was done with it.

Several years later, with rust overtaking the truck’s floorboards, I felt that it was high time to replace it. Gerry said that it would make a great plow truck. He would love to have it. Along with it came the cap of course. He said, “Told you I’d get it back.” He began fixing the rusted areas, found a plow frame for it and even threw some heavy scrap metal in the back for traction when the time came for plowing.

Gerry loved irony, even if the joke was on him. One stormy day he decided that a big pine swaying near the truck should be cut down because he feared it could fall over onto the truck someday. So the next sunny, calm day he got out the chainsaw and went after it. Gerry was an ace mechanic in spite of his belief that several of the major laws of physics didn’t apply to him. Gravity being one of them. He made a perfect cut into the trunk anticipating that it would fall squarely onto the open dirt. Instead, of course, it fell squarely onto the back half of the truck, crushing the cap, distorting the bed and putting that project firmly near the bottom of his to-do- list.

Gerry’s grinning comment was: “See, I was right. That tree could fall on that truck.”

Send Chappy news to peterchappyferry@gmail.com.