A Look On The Lighter Side: Life in the lost and found in my home

Judy Epstein

Somehow the things in my house manage to lead lives of their own, which only occasionally intersect with mine.  

Take the case of the disappearing murder mystery, a book that vanished while I was in the middle of reading it.  I probably put it down to answer the phone, but I never saw it again, let alone found out “who done it.”   

Or consider the earring that disappeared from my jewelry box, only to reappear, years later, in a dusty shoe-box under the bed.  It was the only thing in the box.

I don’t help matters much with my filing system, which my husband likes to describe as “A Place For Everything, and Nothing in Its Place.”  

Actually, it’s more a matter of  “Everything Wherever it will Fit.”  

Thus, mixing bowls go inside the largest stewpot, where I never think to find them;  recipe cards go in the recipe file, or else at the back of an old address book which is the same size; and unpaid bills lie all over the dining room table until we have company, at which point they get popped inside whatever I’m holding when the doorbell rings.  

There is only one method for finding things in such a home. 

Obviously looking somewhere logical will get you nowhere; if we were dealing in logic, you’d have found it already. You need to look in illogical places; wacky places;  places you would never dream of looking.  In short, you require: The Dragnet.  

You must treat your own home like a crime scene, but with less respect.  

You start at the front door and work your way methodically to the back, shaking out every book, leafing through every magazine, leaving no pile of dirty towels un-tossed.  

The drawback to this method is that it turns your life into a giant game of Concentration, where, even when you have found something – say, the potato peeler – you must still remember why you ever wanted it in the first place – oh that’s right, we were making chowder, a month ago.

For a while, this method was working.  But recently, I have seen worrisome signs that my belongings are taking things to a whole new level.  

I think they can sense when they’re about to be needed, and slip into another dimension until the need has passed.  

It started simply enough.  One morning, on my way out to the doctor’s, I looked in my purse and discovered my keys were missing.  

After dumping everything out and searching long enough to miss my appointment, I finally found them…in my purse, of course. 

Then there were the short-sleeve blouses I had to do without for one entire summer.  

I searched high and low, turning out every closet, wondering why someone would break into my home and take only five crummy blouses. I know I heard laughter as the shirts all suddenly re-materialized, the first really cold day of winter, on a hanger inside my winter coat.   

So now I try to play it cool. I just relax, and wait for things to work themselves out.  The trouble is, I don’t know where it’s going to end.  

For instance, I had a pair of black slacks that I wanted to take to the dry cleaner’s, but I was too busy, every day for two weeks, to get them there.  

For every one of those days, those pants were all over the house:  When I opened a door, they were hanging on the doorknob; when I took a shower, they were on the shower rod.  

Open the closet door, and they were on the hook; close the door, and they’d block the mirror.  Everywhere I turned for two weeks, those pants were there.  

But no sooner had I carved out the time to get to the cleaner, than those pants were nowhere to be found.  I looked everywhere.  I even pretended, “Oh, dear, I can’t make it to the cleaner’s after all!”  But the damage was done. The pants were gone.  

I confess I’m curious to see what it will take to bring them back.  Does it simply have to get too cold to wear cotton slacks?  Or does that dry cleaner have to go out of business? 

My husband does have one suggestion for dealing with the chaos. His idea is that I put things away, where they belong, just as soon as I’m done with them.  

As if that would make any difference!

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