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.

Cleaning Woman Calamity

I think my cleaning woman has it in for me.

Without speaking a word of Portuguese, I managed to ask if she’d seen my new, favorite, life-changing bra. And she, with no hablos Ingles, managed to let me know it had gone through the washer and was now in the dryer. In ten years, this woman has never put an undergarment in the washer. Hmmmm.

Marisel wrecks a lot of things. A lot of things. And I’ve tried to part ways with her a couple of times because of it. But, she’s very nice. And I trust her. And she’s fast. And she’s good. So our partings don’t last long.

She wrecks big things and she wrecks little things. An example of a big thing would be the way she severed the string that holds the vertical blinds together. Or the way she’s managed to demolish my overpriced German vacuum. She wrecks things I never even thought possible, like the 40 lb. cast iron stove burner grate, which ultimately needed to be welded back together because it was too old to replace. She doesn’t ever tell me that she’s destroyed something, and sometimes she even hides the evidence. It’s a little like having another kid in the house – though admittedly, an astoundingly clean and productive one.

A big branch from one of our houseplants was recently lopped off. That would be an example of a little thing. As would the glass coffee pot from the Mr. Coffee maker. She broke that directly following my asking her to slow down a little when she cleans so she doesn’t break so many things.

She comes twice a month and I usually spend the day before her arrival securing our possessions. It’s not that I can predict what she will ruin, or in any way prevent it. But she also (in her incredibly well-meaning, non-English speaking way) puts things in places they don’t belong. Most of my friends “pre-clean” for their cleaning woman so the woman can spend time more cleaning rather than tidying. I pre-clean so I can find my coffee cups the next day.

Every other Monday I walk the house slowly, scanning for out-of-place belongings the way the Terminator would scan for Sarah Connor. Each time I tuck something back where it goes, I experience a huge sense of relief. I feel as if I’ve added hours to my life.

I don’t take her wreckage personally. She’s efficient. She’s klutzy. So am I. But the bra incident felt different.

Why, I kept wondering, would she throw my new bra into the machine if not as sabotage? I asked her as much and stood, dripping in my robe, quietly waiting for an answer. I didn’t dismiss it as inconsequential as I’d done with the burner grate, the vacuum, the blinds and the coffee maker.

“Sorry,” she meowed. One of the few English words she knows.

“Ok,” I hissed back. Letting her know that this time, amiga, you are playing with fire.