So, way back in the before times, October 2019, I was visiting my sister and her family. My brother-in-law had recently been to Lowe’s and found a military-grade flyswatter. I had never seen anything like it. It was the only well-made flyswatter I had ever seen. It was thick and strong, and it didn’t flex or bend. I spent an hour before dinner killing flies on their back patio.

When I got home, I went to Lowe’s to get my own military-grade flyswatter, but to my dismay, all they had available were the same old cheap, flimsy ones that had disappointed me for years. Every summer since, I’ve looked whenever I’m in a store that trades in such wares with no luck. I’ve even looked online with no success.

So, last month, Bonnie bought a flyswatter at the grocery store because the swatter part was twice the size of any normal flyswatter. The only problem was that it was stuck to the end of a cheap, telescoping handle that broke the very first time I used it. Why would you need the handle of a flyswatter to retract?

The next day, my sister and her family came to visit. We were sitting on my back patio, and the flies started to buzz around us, so I reached for the flyswatter. I told them about breaking the handle the first time I used it, and how I had been looking for the military-grade flyswatter that they had for years. My brother-in-law said that he had been, too. They saw them at Lowe’s that one time and never saw them anywhere again after that.

That was the extent of our conversation about flyswatters, so you can imagine my surprise when this afternoon, our Amazon driver handed me a flat, rectangular cardboard box that I knew I hadn’t ordered. I saw the word “flyswatter” printed on the box and asked Bonnie if she had ordered flyswatters, but she hadn’t.

When I opened the box and saw three heavy-duty, military-grade flyswatters with “Sergeant Swatter” on the label, I knew exactly who they had come from. I immediately set about looking for my first fly to swat. Of course, there are never any flies around when you want to swat one, so it took a few minutes, but once I got one, I took a picture of it with one of my new flyswatters and sent it to my brother-in-law.

He said that when they returned from their trip, he did a search with the limited information printed on the flyswatter that he had, and had them shipped to me. Wasn’t that nice of him?