Lost and Found

I went to a nice winter's evening musical a few days ago. I was appropriately bundled in warm coat, red gloves, and red knit scarf. After I left the concert, I realized my scarf was missing and presumed lost at the concert venue. It was a nice, thick acrylic knit, easy to wear, easy to clean. Warm. And red--a raison d'etre for anything in my book. I was glum about losing it. A friend gave it to me years ago, and it was in fact second-hand from his friend. It was a traveled scarf before it came to me. I wonder if it will languish in the concert hall's lost and found, if someone picked it up when I left and claimed it, or if its trash-heaped by now? If I go back that way in the next month or so, I'll stop by and ask about it. If I don't, I don't.

A few days after I left the scarf behind, I was driving down a remote road and saw something lying motionless in the middle of the lanes. It looked uncomfortably red, and I was hoping it wasn't a squashed mangled rodent. When I swerved around it, I saw it was a red scarf. Wow, I thought. Thats not MY red scarf, but it was a nice-looking one, that someone must've let fly while going down the highway. There are all kinds of ways to lose things, without trying.

I'm superstitious, if you want to call it that, although I call it mystic. Hey, I lose a red scarf, I grieve suitably, and then a few days later a red scarf appears out of nowhere in my direct path. Waiting for me to makeright the loss. To reconstruct or replace the little meanings I attached to it: warmth, memory, friend, color. It was a cold day, no traffic around, and I could've pulled over and had a good mystic reunion with what was lost.

But then again, it was a cold day. I was on my way to somewhere, and not in the mood to stop and pick up an item that, although neatly completing a found-and-lost cycle, would after all need a good wash. So I drove past it and left a perfectly good found item to its fate. (I wonder if rodents might use it for nesting?)

After all, I don't need to replace everything I lose. Some things are just ready to go. And replacements can never be an original 'thing', although they can grow their own story. Its a responsiblity to keep track of the stories of things, and I try to choose wisely which stories I keep. The scarf story, MY scarf story, was one that was truly ready to go, as the friend who gave it to me was long and unhappily out of my life. I was happy, however, to think that small lost things in life have their own karma. It comforts me to believe that lost and found, or found and lost, things can unexpectedly come back to us. And we can choose to take them back, or not.