Lost and Found

I have lost more stuff in the last fourteen months than I did in the fourteen years before that. As someone who likes to keep track of stuff, this has been very frustrating. Part of the problem was that as we were moving out of our old house, our daughter was moving back in. A month later our youngest son finished classes, moved out of his dorm, and moved in with our oldest son so he could work for two more weeks; then he moved home to a house he had never lived in. Just weeks later our oldest son moved into a newly-built apartment half the size of any place he has ever lived. Chaos reigned. I have decreed that we will never all move within a two-month period again!

In this process my oldest son's baby book was misplaced. I would not even let myself think that it could be lost. It was in a box of his school papers, saved for posterity, which we remembered moving around last summer....

[Note: I started baby books for each one of my children before they were born. It was important for my daughter and even more important for my sons because I heard horror stories of second and third children not having the same keepsakes as firstborns. I have a precious baby book that my mom kept for me, and I wanted the same for each of my children. I also kept scrapbooks, but that story is for another time....]

So I have searched rooms and gone through closets numerous times in both houses. It's not easy to lose a file box but apparently this one was. Almost ready to concede defeat to the forces of things lost, yesterday I decided to go through everything in the basement of our old house one more time.

Lo and behold the box was on the shelf, a shelf that I had searched before. I don't doubt that it was there all the time, but I wondered why I didn't see it. What was the lesson here?

The box was found and the baby book was safe. In the time between lost and found I thought about my attachment to material things and why finding the book was so important. It's the record of the time before and after the birth of my oldest son, who has grown into an honest, intelligent, personable, hard-working man. The answer was not to hold on more tightly to the memories but to make more room for the present. I was able to do that last week-end when he was home, and I am grateful for the time we had together. Finding the baby book was a bonus, and I'm grateful for that, too.