Sunday, January 28, 2018

Lost And Found


  Mid-winter.  Jigsaw puzzle time if you’re a retiree like us in Michigan.  We have four puzzles in our to-do bucket this season including a 1,000-piece challenge puzzle—all kittens and pink flowers.  Very hard.  Ordinarily we can knock out such a puzzle in a couple days.  But this challenge puzzle took us a week.  Then when we finished fitting all the pieces together, we discovered to our dismay we were missing a piece.


   It goes without saying that as we enter our golden years, each day is a lost and found of sorts.  It’s where did I put this or where did I leave that.  Doesn’t help that as you age you accumulate stuff to the point where your home resembles a cross between a museum and a re-sale consignment store.  Stuff is EVERYWHERE.

     But a puzzle piece?  We did move the puzzle from one room to another to make space on our kitchen table for dinner and guests but still an errant jigsaw puzzle piece should stand out on the floor or the carpet.  This one didn’t.  I checked nooks, crannies, under furniture . . . anywhere I thought a piece might have fallen.  No luck.

    This wasn’t the first thing to go missing this week either.  We’re planning an Alaska trip for 2018 and I had a collection of trip documents stored away.  But stored where?  I knew I had moved them from the usual spot next to my computer as the computer had to be moved to accommodate guests over the holidays.

     But when the holidays were over and normality returned, the trip documents didn’t.  I checked every closet, drawer and storage bin in every room of the house.  My wife suggested I even try checking our cars, thinking somehow they got left in there.  Finally, I moved some poster frames that had been resting against a bookcase in the basement and there sat a plastic bag with the documents.  It’d taken me a day to find them.

     Then another day I could not find my favorite stocking hat.  This “Quicksilver” knit hat I had bought in Maine many, many years ago and I found it to be the best protection for my ears during the blast of arctic air we’ve experienced in Michigan lately.  Again, I looked everywhere I normally would have put winter outerwear.  I came up empty.

     I looked atop our piano in the living room thinking I might have tossed it up there without thinking (leaving things somewhere without thinking has become quite commonplace).  It wasn’t there but I saw an empty plastic bag atop the piano.  I recognized it as the bag that contained our challenge puzzle.  When I grabbed it, I discovered there was still a piece inside.  YES!  Our missing puzzle piece.

    And my missing stocking hat turned out to be not in our house at all.  I’d left it at a bar the previous afternoon.  When I went to the bar on a hunch it might be there, they checked their own lost and found.  There it was. 

3 Comments:

Blogger Carine-what's cooking? said...

While we thankfully do NOT have to deal with the cold weather that you and Wendy do, it does seem to be harder to get in our power walks of late. My GF/walking partner has asthma and I am somehow missing the ability to breathe in the gale winds around here. Sam and I walked yesterday and by the time I made the 1 mile point, well, I was panting away and my heart rate was way too high. will find out about that tomorrow morning.
And yes, we seem to lose things! I tend to put things in a place so I'm not too bad on that, but oh my-my dh is forever asking, "where are my keys?" "Where are my glasses?"

10:08 AM  
Blogger Lee said...

I understand completely. I empathise and relate!

Sometimes I can't even find myself! ;)

10:10 PM  
Blogger Big Dave T said...

CARINE--I do have a pass for the local recreation center and do my walking there on a treadmill, though I do try to walk around the house a lot too. I just winter wasn't so long.

LEE--That's good to know that others of sound mind have similar worries. Some days I worry that I'm one step away from one of those 'memory care' centers.

2:35 PM  

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