I watched my husband as he wandered through the house this morning, opening the drawers of the china cabinet, peeking into the recipe box on the kitchen shelf that holds everything but recipes, riffling through the mail on the table next to the front door.
What, I finally asked, are you looking for?
He held up three used lottery-scratch off tickets, the kind that are mostly worth nothing but might get you two or three dollars.
“I think we had more of these,” he said.
I looked around. “Maybe in the basket next to the TV?”
Nope. The basket next to the TV was gone, moved to a shelf in the general pre-Thanksgiving cleanup. When we found it, it was devoid of lottery tickets.
Finding things in our house can be a challenge, not least because my husband moved in here with his parents almost 50 years ago, and no matter how much we clean out and reorganize, it seems like things just accumulate.
And there are multiple people with different standards of tidiness and different ideas about where things belong. For me, it’s that things that are not food or food-preparation related don’t belong on the kitchen table. You don’t want chicken juice to get on your wallet, and you don’t want someone’s gloves in your lunch. And I want to be able to wipe down the table without moving too many things around before and after cooking.
So if you walk in the back door and put your keys and your gloves down on the table, don’t be surprised if they’re not there when you look for them.
Note: I am not claiming consistency. There are plants on the table, too.
It leads to a lot of “Who moved my …” coat, keys, notebook, you name it.
Because we all want things to stay wherever we put them, and we want to be able to find what we are looking for with a minimum of effort.
But that’s not the way things work. Sometimes the thing you are looking for isn’t where you left it, or where you are expecting it to be.
Sometimes, you find joy not in doing what you think will make you comfortable, but in comforting someone else. Sometimes you find beauty not only in great art, but in a child’s drawing. Sometimes you find roses in December, and sometimes you find the Messiah in a manger, among the animals.