Lost and Found

Yesterday I lost three things and I found two. Well, I didn’t really lose them all yesterday. Yesterday was just the day I started a running list of all the things I couldn’t find.

The first was not that important. It was my neighbor’s house key, which is usually in the little cup in the cupboard with all my other neighbors’ house keys. My neighbor asked me to walk her dog in the afternoon and she said, “you have the key, don’t you?” I’d answered before I looked. But she always keeps a spare key hidden at her house, so the dog got walked and I was simply left with a key mystery.

Then I was looking for the phone charger. It was in a plastic ziplock bag along with the car charger and I hadn’t seen it in since we got back from vacation. It’s a charger to an old phone, one that I’d bought a temporary usage plan for while we were at the beach, and now that old phone needed a charge.

I was looking in earnest for the phone charger when it dawned on me that another thing was lost, too, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Oh yeah, my neighbor’s house key. I’ll look for both.

“The other thing that’s missing is the Kindle power cord,” said my husband when I asked if he had the neighbor’s key. He bought me a Kindle for my birthday and I’m sure I’ll like it someday but right now I have no interest in it. I already own my next four books as (what do you call real books now?) "corporal entities," so it’s going to be a while before I can delve into a book electronically. The power cord was on the coffee table since I’d opened the Kindle box, so we quickly blamed the cleaning woman for its disappearance and assumed it would never be seen again.

A day passed and I still couldn’t find the phone charger. I began to curse the amount of “things” we have, always assuming that if we simply had less stuff, everything would be easier to keep track of. “What were the other two things I was looking for?” I asked my husband.

“All I can remember is the Kindle cord,” he said.

I stopped my search and sat down to try and think clearly about what the third missing thing was. “Oh right, the house key.”

I found the Kindle wire in the kitchen drawer. The one where I keep all my “charging wires.” I discovered it when I went in there to get my charger for my cell phone. Guess what else was in there? The ziplock with the other phone charger. What is wrong with my brain that I didn’t even consider looking in the Charging Wire Drawer for the missing charging wires?

Neighbor’s house key: still at large.