Things I found while packing:
- A Polaroid camera, a Holga, and a set of collapsible scrims
- Three spoons (under my daughter’s bed)
- A box of Vitamin C, two bottles of cough syrup, and last year’s pink-eye drops
- A full set of china
- A tea strainer (no one here drinks tea)
- A roasting pan with a rack for chicken or beast; immediately after this purchase I went vegetarian
- A red satin g-string
- One set of handcuffs, closed around the strap of the aforementioned g-string
- Sixteen candy wrappers (under my daughter’s bed)
- A plastic light saber, two Nerf rocket launchers, and one authentic sword
- A gold brocade coat, with fake fur at cuffs and collar
- A wedding quilt made by Drew’s aunt
- Film. Film. Film. Film.
- Approximately nine hundred unidentifiable power cords
- A pair of strappy silver stilettos, complete with hooker rhinestones across the toes
- A dozen orthodontic rubber bands (under my daughter’s bed)
- Seven laptops Drew had salvaged for parts; he traded the whole stack for a used iPad
- A full bottle of Ed Hardy perfume
- Four users manuals for appliances we no longer own
- A chest full of Kids’ Cuties – crayon drawings galore, and glitter!
- A congealed lava lamp (under my daughter’s bed)
- Piggy, my oldest son’s favorite stuffed animal from back in the day
- Notebooks. Everywhere, notebooks, with my stories all over them.
What’s in your lost-and-found?
Photograph by Ellen Von Unwerth
A twenty-nine year-old son. I haven’t tried to claim him yet.
TP, I’m so sorry.
Oh, T.
XO
I must be writer, but I’m not sure that’s always the nicest thing. There’s this detachment that I think all writers bring to any given experience, oftentimes even as it’s occurring. After I hit Send, I thought to myself, why be such a bummer, why flaunt your own sad history on somebody else’s blog? The reason is that I couldn’t think of anything else to say. But seeing the blankness of Averil’s comments section, I felt a need to be the first, to make my mark. It’s not that I have no feelings. Remembering what and who I lost, a son, causes me pain. Time has smoothed the jagged edges of it down into an unobtrusive little pebble lodged in my heart. It’s also true that, yes, it hurts, but damn it—Use it!
Love you both, ladies. XO
I almost asked you to take it down, Averil, but I think it’s better to just be who I am.
Writing is always a bit of a strategic move, isn’t it? Ego, compulsion, the relentless need to disseminate . . . We leave our finer feelings behind when we write. But someone’s got to do it.
I’m so sorry about your son. But yeah, you should use it.
T, I’m responding to your comment below. You are such a writer and I think that’s OK because it’s beautiful and raw. And it’s a whole story in a small comment. Writers have small cold spaces in their heads in amongst all the warmth, and I think that’s just fine. It allows you to do what you have to do, which is to write.
Oh boy! Lots of your lost-and-found sounds like uncovered treasure.
My lost-and-found (when I actually find it), includes my real copy of Elephant by the White Stripes which I haven’t been able to find so I can fix the tracks on my iPod that skip because I loaded them from my daughter’s burned-by-a-friend copy. Other than that, I’m hoping to find stuff my ex left that I didn’t realize was expensive.
The treasure hunt! My husband found a watch that appears to be gold. It has an 18k mark on the back, etc. But it doesn’t feel heavy enough so we’re on the fence about whether it’s genuine. (The fact that he doesn’t remember getting it doesn’t bode well.) He’s toted it around from house to house as though enlightenment might dawn at some point.
Three positive pregnancy sticks. My high school diary. A love letter from a college boyfriend who had a psychotic break. Three corn-on-the-cob holders. A pack of ancient Dentyne gum.
We’re not moving, but we are gutting a third of our house for remodel. It’s the domino effect of moving shit around. Scary. Sometimes in a good way.
That kitchen is going to look fantastic, you’ll want to throw a sleeping bag on the floor and never leave it.
It’s weird the way styles change. You’d think that people from decades past would also have wanted a more workable kitchen, would also have been driven insane by the low-hanging cabinets. They must have considered the kitchen a room to hurry in and out of, on the way to someplace better.
Lost- My probable death, mental, spiritual, emotional and physical, due to sciatica pain.
Found- The realisation that the back operation that just turned me into a human again is not the end of the story. It’s going to be a few months yet before I’m able to be whatever it is I am that kinda sorta passes for normal. And even then, the back pain I always had will stay with me, but it’s ok.
And also found- Much gratitude. While us Aussies do tend to cop the rough end of the pineapple by all sorts of big corporations who use all sorts of flimsy excuses to charge us double what most of the world pays for stuff, our medical care is outstanding, and pretty much free. Cost of my spine operation by one of the best surgeons on the planet? Zero dollars. Thank you Australia, and thank you doctors, nurses, and every member of every hospital staff that keeps helping to put us back together again when we’re broken.
Found: One comment from Mr iPants, which had been lost in the spam folder.
What a relief it is to hear from you! I had visions of you in a full body cast, drinking Ensure from a straw and trying to communicate by blinking once for yes, twice for no. Thank goodness you’re back amongst the living, my friend. We’ve missed you.
XOXO
Oh I’m back, and more annoying than ever.
You’ll be wishing I wasn’t before long.
Life is good.
Quite an interesting list. My wife and I moved into our current house 6 years ago. The basement is filled with boxes we never got around to unpacking. Next time we move we should have some surprises.
Why do we keep hauling this shit around and never opening it? That’s what I want to know.
My sister-in-law lost everything she had in a fire a few years ago. It was horrible and scary, and the thought of the lost photographs breaks my heart, but I have to admit there’s something light and beguiling about starting again with nothing.
That “why do we keep hauling this shit around” question is a very good one. Items I have found over the past couple weeks include a mess of deteriorated mixed-media artwork I made in the 1990s when I was the World’s Greatest Artist, and just this past weekend a banker’s box filled with the papers from my most recent close encounter with grad school. I thought, If any of this dirty, decrepit, spider-infested crap meant anything to me–I mean, anything healthy–then what’s it doing in the storage space out back, collecting dirt and spiders and falling apart? What is going on here? Is this the shadow of the toddler in toilet training who is too afraid to crap it out and too fascinated with his own turds to flush them away?
All that stuff I found would make a nice bonfire in the back yard, but I live in the middle of the city so I shall have it hauled off by scantily-paid professionals. As for your sister-in-law, I am sorry she lost everything in a fire, but I agree with the attraction of traveling lightly through life. Susan and I plan to lighten our load still further before we move to Chicago next year. I told her, We’re going, even if all we take with us are the clothes on our backs (and her favorite cat, in a cat carrier).
I have the same issues with my photographs. Boxes and boxes of negatives from clients whose names I don’t recall–and I’m saving them because . . . Fuck if I know. It feels wrong to toss them. (And I have the scans on a hard drive, so there’s no excuse for me.)
Who cares about little ol’ me. I wanna know more about those handcuffs and whether or not there’s a key.
I want to know where she found them.
Yes, the key was with them. They were found in what appears to be someone’s idea of a kit.
I love the vague language. And I mean that without an ounce of snark.
There are five unidentified keys in our Stuff Drawer in the kitchen. My MIL won’t let us throw them away in case they fit something important. They might, but not in our current house.
Ha! Yesterday Drew found a key ring with the spares for the car-before-last, a possible mailbox key, and something that may fit a cabinet somewhere.
I’m holding out for Narnia and Janie keeps hoping for an Indian in a Cupboard. But that’s probably pushing it.
When we moved last year, we found the missing second car key, a necklace my young man gave me early in our courtship and which I loved even though I lost it, my uncle’s Ph.D. dissertation. When I told him I had it, he told me to throw it away. Advice I didn’t take.
Mmm, interesting. What was the title of the dissertation?
the found stuff:
when we moved into our last house, a house that my mother and father (and then just father) had lived in for the previous 20+ years i found a huge bong made out of a gallon-sized glass bottle of whisky hidden behind the water-heater.
when we renovated the basement of the house and tore down the drop ceiling tiles, my husband found an old cassette tape that had been stuck up there for over ten years. i couldn’t find a cassette player to save my life after he found it. and then, at work, i remembered there was an old-school radio player in the basement/work-out room of my office. i raced downstairs and listened to a fight my mother had recorded between her and my dad—him three sheets to the wind and trying to leave the room, her following after him, doing that thing she would do to nag him on, get him to slip-up, say something she could use against him. i could hear her calm, calculating, manipulative voice and his drunken slurs over the crackling of the magnetic tape.
that house literally had walls (drop-ceilings?) that could talk.
the lost stuff:
for more than seven years, i have been missing two journals–one from my high school years, the other from my last year of college and the following summer. one a red mead notebook, the other a dark red 5-star notebook with college-ruled pages. i can remember specific passages from both. goofy teenage stuff about making out in the high school one, the other had an entry from the night i met my now husband. they’re both gone. another journal went missing for a few weeks, but i knew where it was (stolen) and got it back after confronting the person who took it. (i’d later find a photo-copy of the entire thing in an over-sized manilla envelope in the back of their closet while helping them move.)
(it’s scary just to write this here. talk about these things. i don’t know that i’ve ever mentioned any of this before.)
Wow. That’s a woman who likes other people’s secrets. I wonder whether she used to sit under open windows as a child, or hide under beds or at the backs of closets.
This is a rich story vein, Josey, as I’m sure you’re aware. Makes my fingers itch.
When it’s scary to write it, Josephine, that’s when you know you’re on the right track.
I don’t even want to relive the horror that was my packing/moving experience last week, so I’ll just say that I’m freaking out that I lost my niece’s birthday package. I thought I was being all organized by wrapping her gifts (books signed to her from the author, not something super easy to replace…) and packing them in the box in advance. I even wrote out the address on the box! My plan had been to take the box to work before I moved so I’d know where it was and could mail it from there. But no, of course I didn’t do that, and now the box must be somewhere in my mountains of unpacked things. And her birthday ticks closer…
Moving is hell. But throwing out a bunch of stuff is kind of satisfying, isn’t it?
Shit. I hope you find the box. I’m trading one of my cameras in and have it similarly boxed and ready to ship off. Maybe I should get on that before it gets buried.
Throwing stuff away is the best part of moving, though I have to dodge both Drew and my mother while I’m at it. They’re a couple of packrats, and Drew is turning into Al Bundy when he sees something going to waste. What I do is collect things in the corner, and when he leaves the house for any reason I race out and plunk them on the curb.
I’m all for marital harmony.
Last fall, while my husband was on a business trip, I cleaned out the garage. We still had boxes — unopened boxes — from the move 6 years ago. I wound myself into such a focused, cleaning frenzy, I literally sliced the boxes open, took a cursory peek, and set most of it in the 1-800-Got-Junk pile. Man oh man, how I love 1-800-Got-Junk !!
What have I found recently? Nothing.
Why? Because I’m afraid to look.
What?! You’ve been holding out on me! I’ve made ten trips to the Goodwill trailer for crying out loud, when I could have called Got Junk. Oh man. I’m going to remember that for next time.
I am afraid to look too deep as well but I can guarantee you this: No handcuffs, heels or red satin will be found. If so that Neil will have some ‘splainin to do.
Well, you’re six feet tall so heels are not necessary. Stilettos are the female version of a muscle car; some of us need to compensate.
Lost: Frontal virginity; Youthful wasted energy; Belief in political solutions; Propensity to infatuation; Megalomania; Several persons loved neither wisely nor well; A couple of cats and several homes; Various pacifiers; Etc. etc. etc.
Found: A life partner; The ability to hold on tightly in any storm; Craftsmanship; Patience; Triage as an approach to life; Forgiveness; Appreciation; A well-made tuning kit for my bullshit detector; The well from which flows the never-ending replenishment of dreams and ideals; Etc. etc. etc….
My bullshit detector needs a major overhaul. I am taken in EVERY DAMN TIME. You’ve never met anyone as naive as I am.
The evidence is that I still wish for political solutions. Which is idiotic, I know.
On a more cheerful note, I just remembered: when we sold our sixteen year-old car for scrap, we cleaned out the glove box. In it I found a pair of glasses that were already old when I abandoned them for a new Walmart Optical set of frames. Those specs were from the late Eighties, pink-framed and saucer-wide. Whenever I wear them, hipsters of all genders gush with envy over their geeky hotness.
Oh! I found a pair of glasses, too. Very nerdy librarian, with tortoiseshell frames. I may add them to the g-string/handcuff kit and see where I get.
It takes a lot to get me to laugh out loud. That did it.
Lost? Well, there was that IU sweatshirt that I loved. I have no idea what became of it. And that was after the days when I left a trail of clothes between wherever I was living and wherever I might have slept the night before.
Recently, while moving out the old washer to make way for the new one, I found a family of bobby pins, .68 in coins, two soda can pull tabs, one hair tie, a pizza joint marketing magnet and my dignity.
You found your dignity? Can I set you on the hunt for mine? I’ve just told the gang about the red g-string, I think we can safely say it’s lost.
Turns out dignity is overrated. Keep the g-string.
I like how the sexy things are placed at even intervals in your list– along with your daughter’s hidey-hole. What in the world did that girl have going on under there? Was she able to sleep in the bed or would it teeter on the mountain of stuff?
If there’s anything that child can do no matter the conditions, it’s sleep.
I’ll take the tea strainer.
The best thing I ever found (other than my wife and some self respect) was a book mark my kids had given me that I thought I had accidentally threw away. It turned up about 20 years later when I was moving into my little writing room. I save it for reading special books. (When is yours going to be published?)
When I was a kid, I always felt I was shorting my parents when I gave them things I had made. Now I know they weren’t lying when they said they’d rather have a homemade gift than anything I could have bought.
No idea when that book will be published. Someone will have to buy it first.
I can wait (thought not necessarily patiently).
On one of my great summer rehashes I opened a trunk of my ex-husband’s from his posting just after I left him. Apart from the stash of Ethiopian silver I was heartened to find love letters from the poor girl who loved him next – who I know was treated badly.
I didn’t know what to do with them.