Ask me where the thumbtacks are
Things lost and found
At our Rogue Writers’ Group last evening, the prompt was: Write about something you lost (or found again). The prompt was inspired by the 2006 piece written by Brian Arundel in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction.
In terms of things I have lost, I don’t count that number beyond 9 or 10. More than a handful of things lost means they’ve been long forgotten, thus making them not all that necessary.
Recently, I lost my favorite pair of reading glasses (they’re prescription and to my mind, make me look a little bit like Wonder Woman’s human form, Diana Prince). So I refuse to take the past tense verb when I talk about them, because I fully expect them to turn up one day: on the shelf in my closet under a tee shirt I didn’t put away properly, or under the bed, knocked off the nightstand in the dark sleep times, by me, or Buddy the Cat.
As a mother, a large hank of my job is to know where literally everything in our house is, down to the individual contents of the junk drawer (a labeler, a can of thumbtacks, two little bottles of touch up paint from Mazdas we don’t own anymore, for example). And, for some inexplicable reason, the whereabouts of each item in the chaos of my husband’s garage workbench.
One thing I have lost is the ability to sleep through the night. Sometimes, after waking up at 2:30 am again (and scanning Life360 to see if that last teen came home), I think about when I was not yet 30 and I had my AOL email address and the internet didn’t really exist beyond email and how I would come home and maybe watch a little TV, write in my journal, listen to Cowboy Junkies on my three-CD-changer, and go to bed and sleep and sleep and sleep.
I wonder how many individual items are in my 2,800 square foot, 5 bedroom suburban home? Is the number more than 10,000? Is it a million? If we counted every cardamom pod and all of those thumbtacks individually? Not to mention the various buckets of screws and bolts and ratchet things that are waiting in the garage?
I have a lot of ideas for things to do with my days off, but the only way I can achieve them, usually, is to make a short, non-intimidating list and check them off, one by one. Inevitably, other tabs open in my day to distract me — I might even finish those things too: submit a poem, plan a camping weekend, call my sister back, discover why ebooks are so expensive for libraries and what a possible solution may be.
One thing I have lost somehow is two decades of my life as a singular person. By any measure of parenting and domesticity, I should receive an award as a mom and a wife. That’s not necessary. No thank you. I don’t need anymore breakable objects to keep track of, or get blamed for.
And now as the nest is emptying, I am having a hard time not counting up the remainders in shards and detritus and loss.
Someone, somewhere, will tell me I should count my blessings. I know. I probably will someday.
But also:
One more thing to count.
Thanks for reading.
Beautifully vulnerable.
Three things: 1. I agree with Jessica. 2. I always feel excited when I see your name in my inbox and would miss it if I lost it (see what I did there?) 3. I can picture you as Diana Price.