Lost and Found

While winter weather has barely arrived, the annual phenomenon of lost items is well on its way. I mean things like a lonely mitt (usually in a small size), a scarf or even a tuque ending up on the sidewalk, in the snow. Kind souls pick these up and put them on fences or other handy places so they may be retrieved by their owners, more often than not children who got too hot for a scarf or had to remove a mitt to show something to a friend. Or got into a fight.

Adults also loose things. Getting out of my car a couple of days ago at a grocery store, one woman’s glove on the ground caught my eye. It had no doubt fallen while the owner was putting groceries into her car. I put the glove on top of a recycling container near the entrance to the store in the hope that the woman would return once she realized one of her gloves was missing. Hope she did. It looked expensive.

But what I saw the next day still has be baffled. Walking along on the sidewalk a woman’s booth was displayed upside down on top of one of the posts holding the plastic mesh the city puts around the lower section of small trees to protect them during the months of bad weather. My first thought, of course, was how did the woman get home with only one booth? Must have been one hell of a Christmas party! Was she carried? By whom? There has to be quite a story there!

It’s not always easy to find things once you drop them in the snow. Why getting into my car during the last snowfall, my keys slipped out of my hands, and the more I tried to dig them out with my gloved hands, the more the snow seemed to want to play hide and seek. It took me a while to dig down to the pavement and retrieve the darn things, but it was a lesson well learned for an old bird like me. Now my vigilance about not dropping keys or anything else in the snow is sharper.