Angie and Aaron Evenson’s daughters had a weekly tradition. Every Thursday morning, Grace, 5, Rosie, 3, and Sophia, 15 months, gathered by the window to wave and grin at their favorite garbagemen, Brandon Olsen and Taylor Fritz. “It was a highlight of their week,” Angie tells Us Weekly. “No matter what they were doing, they would scramble to get to that window!”
Unbeknownst to Olsen and Fritz, Rosie was diagnosed with cancer in September 2016. “We were on our way home from a camping trip and Rosie was running a fever, so we took her to urgent care,” says the Blue Earth, Minnesota-based mom, 34. “In a nightmarish turn of events, we discovered she had stage four kidney cancer that had spread to her lungs.”
So when the men dropped off three bags of Halloween candy for the girls in October, Angie left them a note for Olsen and Fritz that Rosie would be having chemotherapy treatments on Thursdays and that the sisters hadn’t forgotten about them.
Fritz broke down when he opened the envelope. “I got to the chemo part and there were tears running down my face,” he told ABC News in December. “I don’t have any children of my own, but I can imagine if someone very close to me was diagnosed, I’d be heartbroken.”
The following week Olsen and Fritz showed up at the Evensons’ door with a letter in hand, offering them free garbage service for one year on behalf of Hometown Sanitation. “I was speechless. I’m sure to them it felt like a small gesture,” Angie tells Us. “But to us it was huge.”
Angie hopes Rosie will be reunited with Olsen and Fritz soon. But the family has only been home for two days in the past month.
“We just got out from a two-week hospital stay because Rosie got so ill after the last round of chemo and was bedridden,” she says. “It was very rough.”
The Evensons are staying positive, though: “Rosie is slowly regaining strength,” Angie tells Us. “If all goes smoothly, she’ll be done with treatment in July.”
Angie’s sister Amber Blom set up a GoFundMe page to help with Rosie’s medical expenses