At the house that was apparently ours in the world we ended up in, we took the opportunity to wash our clothes, and we looked through papers to try to see how we lived on this world. It looked like we had a handyman business.

“Yep, totally believable for us,” Henry commented.

“And probably missing us today,” I added.

But they weren’t missing us today, as it turned out. About 6:30, while we were eating dinner we made with the food here, another Joe and Ellen walked in the front door.

“Told you, Joe” other-Ellen said.

“So you did, Ellen” other-Joe said.

“Well, this is awkward,” I admitted. “But I can explain.”

Other-Joe replied, “Please do. Ellen and I both dreamed last night about the trailer we see out front, and about gender-swapped versions of us, which didn’t make much sense, as we’ve never felt in the least transgender, not even to crossdress for each other. Ellen bet me that our other selves would be here when we pulled up and saw the trailer out front for real, and now she’s won that bet.”

I started, “OK, I will try to keep the long story short. I’m Joe, but Angela when dressed female. My partner is Ellen, or Henry when male. We went on a reality do-it-yourselfer show and we won.”

“Oh, like the one we signed up for?” other-Ellen asked, then to other-Joe said, “They already won. We don’t even need to do it now.”

“We’ll compare notes later,” I said. “But let me continue.”

“Certainly.”

“We won, and our prize was the pickup parked out front, and some cash, and we got to use anything out of a closed hardware store to work on a project for three months. We built the trailer.”

“I can believe that,” other-Joe said. “That is the kind of thing we might do.”

“And we tried to drive it back here, and camped out in it along the way. And that’s when things got weird. Ellen and I dreamed the same dream, that we had visited the land of Oz. And we woke up there. And every night we slept in the trailer again, dreamed a shared dream, and went to the place from that dream.”

“So,” other-Ellen said hesitantly, “We’re from some movie or TV show world of yours that you dreamed up?”

“Oh, crap!” Henry shouted. “I dreamed about that crazy show last night where Donald Trump is president and as a result everything was messed up.”

“That’s our world!” other-Joe and other-Ellen shouted together.

“F**k!” Henry and I shouted.

“I guess crossdressing is going to be out for us here,” I said. “Trump hates trans people more than anybody.”

Other-Joe said, “Well, I don’t know about that. He hates a lot of people. But trans people are definitely one of those he has it in for. You’re welcome to stay, but yeah, unless you can pass really well, you probably shouldn’t crossdress while you’re here.”

The other couple made some dinner for themselves and joined us, and we told them about our experience.

“When we got into town, we went to our address from our own world first, and the house was different and somebody else was living there. But we checked our online accounts and found we lived here in this world, so we came here. And our key opened the door, so we thought we’d found home. At least, a home. We didn’t realize there’d be our other selves here.”

“Well, if we didn’t both dream that you’d show up, we’d have a lot of trouble believing it,” other-Joe said.

“You dreamed about us. Weird. I wonder if we had other selves in those other worlds and affected their dreams, too. If we did, we never met those other selves,” Henry said.

We weren’t particularly happy just knowing that we were living in Trump world, but it was a place we could test out the theory that we wouldn’t jump worlds if we didn’t sleep in the trailer. Other-Joe said we could live with them as long as we helped with the work at their woodworking shop, which was something we might have done ourselves in our own world, if we could have gotten the seed money to set it up.

“You want to try staying here?” I asked Henry.

“We can try it. I know I’m getting tired of waking up in a different world every day. Assuming, of course, that the jumping worlds really is caused by sleeping in the trailer. Since it started the first night we slept in the trailer, we’ve been assuming it was related, but we didn’t visit another normal world before this one. Sort of normal, anyway.

After our other selves finished dinner, we all compared notes. As far as this world was concerned, we were the same two people. The accounts we’d looked up to find our addresses were the accounts our other selves used. We had credit cards with the same numbers. Our cell phones had the same numbers, and they went a little batty when we tried to use them at the same time. We figured they probably had identical SIMs and the network wasn’t equipped to handle such twins.

“No problem. We’ll go get you new SIMs tomorrow and add you to our family plan.”

They also agreed that, so that we would all have unique names, but ones matching our appearance, Henry and I would go by Henrietta and Angelo, while they would remain Joe and Ellen here. As the visitors, we agreed to that. Also, Henrietta and I had pins from the show, and we agreed we’d wear those to help distinguish ourselves - or name badges when we were in their store.

Our other selves had a guest room which they set up for us, so we slept in a bed other than the one in our trailer for the first time in several nights... and woke up still there.

“Yay, we made it!” I said as we came out to join them for breakfast, when I saw our doubles were already there eating.

“Welcome, Angelo and Henrietta,” Joe greeted us.

They had made food for us as well, and when they finished theirs, Joe explained what they do in more detail.

“We have a carpentry store. We sell wooden furniture we’ve made from new materials, unfinished or finished-to-order. We also repair and refinish antique wooden furniture, both items that customers bring in, for a fee, and items we pick up from yard sales, discarded as scrap, or whatever, which we sell in our shop. Some of our friends help us find these items, and we also go out...”

Joe checked the time.

“... Right now, in the neighborhood where trash is being picked up, to look for items people are throwing out and take a pickup-load with us back to the shop. There’s more area we could cover each day, so if we both go, we could split up and pick up more things.”

So we finished our food quickly so we could get out before the garbage men picked up and threw away the stuff people had set out. The guidelines Joe gave us were admittedly similar to what I would have set myself. If it was wooden furniture set out as trash or marked “FREE”, and there wasn’t a serious problem with it, like if it was covered in something disgusting, just pick it up. Only real wood, though; anything made of particle board or similar should be skipped. Mixed metal-wood, such as wooden tabletops with metal legs, is OK if there is no or only minor rust. Broken is OK, as long as there are some useful parts. Even if it was too difficult to repair, it could provide parts for repairing similar items. Joe gave us an area to cover and then the address of the store, and said we should scour the area until the pickup bed was full or until 9 AM and in either case head to the store.

We actually reached the point it was hard to pack anything else into the truck bed, even with tie-down cables, around 8:30, and made it to the store just a couple minutes ahead of Joe and Ellen. They pulled up just as we were starting to unload our treasures, and joined us in that effort. Soon, we had lined up five bookcases, two dressers, four regular wooden chairs, two folding wooden chairs, two desks, one dining room table, and a few other miscellaneous items.

“You get this much stuff every day?”

“Well, in the past it’s been half that, and only four days a week. Fridays, the area where trash gets picked up is way on the other side of town, and we never really felt it was worth going that far.”

Ellen added, “We don’t manage to use it all. Some of it is just too beat up, though we may salvage pieces of it.”

Joe commented, “We collect the chairs. Sometimes people want one or two chairs to match ones they have, so we keep a bunch of different styles, and only rarely do we sell a set of four along with a table. If one of the spokes in the back is missing or broken, and we have a match, we replace it. If we don’t, we replace all the spokes with plain dowels, and save the good ones as spares.”

As we went into the store, he showed me where they had stacks of two to five chairs in each of several styles, plus a couple stacks of unmatched chairs. But all the new items went into the workshop, where there were a few items in progress and lots of parts, tools, raw wood, and the like. Ellen showed us around.

“It sounds like you are as experienced as we are with this, so just use your best judgment,” Joe told us.

I grabbed a chair at random from the new arrivals and checked it out thoroughly. One of the rungs on the bottom was busted, which made the whole chair a little wobbly, but it seemed like if that was fixed it would be in good shape. One of the back spokes was loose and spun freely, but that just needed some glue. I asked Joe about where they kept spare bottom rungs and he pointed me to a drawer which had about twenty in various styles.

“Don’t worry if that’s not a perfect match. It’s down low where people aren’t going to be looking closely. Just pick one that’s roughly the right style.”

Indeed, I did not find an exact match, but there were several that had the general pattern of broad bulbs with a couple spherical ones of the right thickness and length, and I picked one, wedged it in, and added some glue to hold it in place. I also glued the loose back rung. Then i set it aside to let the glue dry and grabbed a bookshelf to work on.

The bookshelf was structurally sound, but it was badly worn, the finish worn through to bare wood on some of the shelves where books had been shelved and removed many times. Most of the outside was filthy. On one side there were a bunch of stickers some kid had put there... a kid who was likely now middle-aged. It was clear this needed to be sanded down to the wood, especially since once those stickers were removed there were likely going to be spots where the finish did not match.

I had already seen the section labeled SANDING AREA when we came in. There were several different sanding tools, ranging from large belt sanders to a Dremel tool for fine work, and I knew I’d use a few of those to do both the large, easily accessible flat surfaces and the inside corners which were hard to get at. I tried peeling the stickers, but they ripped into small pieces. He had a cleaning solution which I applied and used a scrubber like you’d use to wash dishes with stuck-on food to wash off most of the muck and also clean off the stickers. A few bits of sticker remained, nevertheless, so I used a coarse sander to get them off before working on the remains of the finish.

Once I had gotten even the traces in the inside corners out with appropriate Dremel attachments, I put it out next to other unfinished bookshelves. It was only at this point that I realized Ellen was out front, running the store. At some point she’d quit working on furniture to do that. When I got back into the workshop, Joe was also just finishing a job, and he suggested we take the table to work on together next.

The top was heavily worn, so this was going to be another one we had to sand down. But first we needed to fix the table, if we could even do that. One leg was loose because the piece at the top that held it to the table top was cracked. Another leg had presumably been broken and had been replaced with a length of 2x2 which hadn’t been shaped other than to fit it into the bracket at the top and cut it to the right length. Even that had been done poorly, and cracked the wood. We removed the leg to examine it.

“Do you have a lathe?” I asked. “The top of this was formed well and it just needs to be shaped like a leg to look good.”

“We do, but we try to sub in matching parts before we use it. It takes twice as long to make one good table leg on a lathe as we usually spend on an entire piece of furniture.”

So instead, he removed the wobbly leg and showed me where they had a large bin with a couple dozen table legs in it. There was one that was a reasonably good match, and I brought it over.

By this point Joe was working on the socket for the wobbly leg. He’d removed the cracked diagonal piece the leg mounted against, and cut a piece of 1x4 to replace it. We lifted the table upside-down on top of a workbench to give Joe access to fasten this against the lip of the table. I had to shave about 1/8 inch off one side of the top of the leg to fit it in, but I did that, we marked the spots for the screw holes, drilled, and finally, we screwed the new leg on. The table no longer wobbled.

The next step was clearly going to be to sand it down, but Joe called for a break. It was now 11:45 and time to start lunch. One corner of the workshop was walled off and there was a small kitchen in it. It seemed Joe and Ellen normally had sandwiches for lunch and that was fine with us too. There was a countertop just long enough for the four of us, and with me and Henrietta in the middle, Joe retrieved each ingredient and passed it down the line. We each applied it or not, as desired, and Ellen at the other end put the things back away.

There was a round table with two chairs and Joe went out and got two more chairs so we could all use it. We enjoyed our lunches and chatted for a bit. We agreed it was going well; we were actually on pace to get through almost all of the newly acquired pieces today. We cleaned up, and then went back to work.

By this point, the chair I’d glued and two that Henrietta had worked on were good, and we took them out front. Ellen came out with us, unlocked the front door, and replaced a sign that said “Closed for lunch / Ring bell for service” with one that simply said OPEN. Henrietta and I found the most closely matching stacks of chairs to add the three new ones to, and headed back for the workshop.

Joe was sanding the table and did not seem to need help, so I grabbed the smaller desk and Henrietta took one of the folding chairs.

The desk was solid, but definitely needed work. The finish was worn to bare wood in places. It was a kid’s desk and again it had old stickers on it. There was one small gouge I could fill in with putty. And the pulls on all the drawers were in bad shape. One was missing, and one was literally falling apart. How old was this desk, anyway? Aside from those defects there wasn’t really any damage. I am surprised nobody in the neighborhood snapped this up, because it was completely functional apart from the missing and broken pulls, just a bit ugly. I removed all the pulls, cleaned off the grime and stickers, and set it over next to the sanding area to work on when Joe was done there.

I started on a chair, and when Joe was done I sanded the desk. I got the chair done as well, and started looking at a dresser that had some major damage. Ultimately, I decided the dresser was not salvageable. Two drawers were broken, and the bottom panel was missing. It provided a bunch of good pieces of wood, pulls, and drawer slides, and Joe showed me where they kept all those things in the workshop. While I was there, I found a set of pulls suitable for the desk and put them on, though it was likely that when anybody painted or stained it they would take them off again. Still useful to have something there until then.

We had a few pieces of furniture left, but Joe called closing time. They closed the store and we all went home and ate dinner. We had a relaxing evening and it was nice to be able to sleep in a real bed again. I reminded Joe that we didn’t do the thing with the phone SIMs, and he promised to do it the next morning.

Friday morning, without a trash district to search, we decided that Henrietta and I would bring our trailer in to work, and then Ellen would run the store alone for a bit while Joe took us to a store where we could get some phone SIMs. Once that was accomplished, and we confirmed we could all call and text everybody else, we got to work on the trailer.

We had decided we were retiring the trailer as a travel vehicle. It would serve as external storage, while the tools in it would be brought inside and added to Joe and Ellen’s supply. And the bed absolutely had to be removed; nobody was to sleep in it, or in the trailer at all, ever again, to avoid any possibility that the trailer, us, the sleeper, or anybody else nearby would head off into dreamworlds elsewhere. But we kept the bed in case we changed our minds. There was a small attic storage area Joe and Ellen did not really use, but it was big enough to slide the bed into, so that is what we did with it.

We soon realized the trailer would be better with an electrical hookup, and we found shopping online an adapter that cost $50 that would let us plug the trailer’s campsite hookup into a 240-volt outlet, which the store was equipped with, and I went out to pick it up when we saw it was available locally.

Joe also took some time to update us on other activities. Weekends were busy. Especially on Saturday mornings, they went out through yard sales looking for furniture, typically in a better condition from what they picked out of the trash, on sale cheap. Saturday and Sunday afternoons they both stayed in the store, as a lot of customers came in and tended to buy up a significant portion of the refurbished furniture from that week, and sometimes they took finishing and/or delivery orders. Sunday morning, both weekend evenings, and at various other times they worked on the finishing and delivery orders, and with us around they thought it would make those a lot easier.

As for today, Joe and Ellen had two finishing orders that had indeed been finished and were due to be delivered. After confirming the customers were both available, we put pads around them to protect them and strapped them to one side of the truck bed for delivery. Henrietta rode with Joe for this delivery, and I was promised a chance to ride with Ellen on other deliveries soon.

While they were out doing that, I had a finishing order of my own to start. I got two coats applied before the end of the day, doing the repairs on other remaining furniture while I waited for the first coat to dry, while Ellen tended the shop.