Lost Things

Loretta's "List Friday" topic is lost things... those things that you've lost that have haunted you and you still from time to time wonder about them...

1. TIME. Where does it all go? How can I spend a week feeling constantly busy, but then not know what I did? Or maybe that's lost TIME and lost MEMORY? Sigh.

2. My gorgeous blue faux-sapphire earring. I had these earrings, one of those pair that aren't real gems but are expensive faux-gems and really look like real gems, you know? They were the prettiest sapphire-like things, studs in just the size to look small enough to be real but not so small that the were miniscule. They were the perfect earrings to wear in all sorts of situations. I always took them off and put them in one spot in my jewelry box, and then, inexplicably, one was gone. I still hope that I'll stumble onto it, tangled up in something.

3. My small corningwear teapot. In college, I shared an apartment with my good friend Cheri. And we had this tiny, white corningwear teapot, the perfect thing for boiling water to make a few cups of tea. Well, at some point I left it sitting on the counter filled with white vinegar to try to remove the minerals that had calcified on the inside...and we never saw it again! Cheri swore she hadn't thrown it out, and I hadn't thrown it out...it was just one of those things that sat there soaking on the counter for enough time that we stopped noticing it...and then it was gone. There had been friends staying there during that time, but no one admitted to doing anything with it. Maybe the vinegar disintegrated it totally? Or maybe it's a cosmic message that things you stop noticing will eventually wander out of your life and vanish? Quite the mystery.

4. Last month -- on Mother's day, to be exact -- my mom showed me a diary that her mother, my grandmother, had kept during the years 1953 and 1954. I'd never known that my grandmother kept a diary, but according to my mom, Grandma had written a few factual lines every day for as long as my mom could remember. In the years between my grandmother's death and the death of her husband (my mom's stepdad), he had thrown away (!!) all of them except that one volume. My mom and aunt were sick with misery over his disposing of the diaries and not giving them the chance to claim them. He had apparently kept this one volume to pass it to my mom, because it covered the year she married my dad and the year my sister was born. So, I only discovered the fact of the diaries' existence at all a month ago, and now I can't stop thinking about them and wondering about them. I was very charmed to read that one volume... I knew my grandmother well, from a kid's perspective...she lived about a mile away and we saw her all the time, often staying overnight at her house. She died when I was in high school, so I don't really have a grown-up perspective on her. But reading her brief diary entries -- just of the daily things she did, what she made for dinner, when she played cards with her sister and brother in law -- brought her voice rushing back and made me feel very happy. Oh, for those lost volumes...

5. My green and peach needlepoint pillow. I learned to needlepoint in college. My roommate freshman year, Andrea, was from Beverly Hills (a whole education in and of itself for me, living with someone who'd grown up in that "Bev Hills" life) and over one weekend visit to her home, I got turned on to needlepoint. And that led to my taking a few classes (at a great tiny store in Newport Beach called "Nantucket West") and eventually to my designing a pillow that looked like lacy ribbons woven together, all in peaches and forest green and cream. It was a lot of work and was pretty elegant, considering the era and the color combination and my relative novice status.) Anyway, my learning needlepoint led to my sister learning needlepoint -- and now she makes her living designing needlework and her favorite thing to do is intricate lacy stitches like I used in that peach and green pillow. But where did the dang thing go?

6. Here's the sort of loss that makes me nuts: a quilting item I bought, stashed away, and then can't find when I finally want to use it. You know, that particular piece of green tulle. That pack of double pointed pins to try for matching seams. That bottle of a new brand of glue. I HATE when I KNOW I have something and can't find it...Of course, it appears as soon as I go out and buy the replacement.

7. Friends who've drifted away. It is so hard to have a friendship end if you're not ready to end it. I have one former friend who inexplicably stopped returning my calls. It took me YEARS, literally, to find out why...after I dreamed about her, wrote to her, talked to mutual friends to find out what was wrong. In the end, the answer was so bizarrely anti-climactic that it still puzzles and bewilders me, and makes me think either that I never really knew my friend to begin with, or it simply can't be the reason. I've just had to try to let it go. But in any event, those friendships which end without closure are so ... painful.