LOST AND FOUND

Lost things aren't gone. You find yourself searching for that ribbon,  photo, letter, or memento that you put somewhere, but can't find anymore. You can't pick it up, but gee, it keeps itching in your mind.

Found things  --wow -- a wave of joy comes over you, like  balmy fresh air.

I had a towel -- green -- part of a set I bought for my bathroom about 12 years ago when I came back to NYC, temporarily, and then, decided I'd stay. I bought green things and redecorated my bathroom, my private room in which there are shelves and a cabinet. Things I use, or used to use, or want to use are assembled, and more or less maintained, often deliberately ignored, but that's also a way of maintaining them.

One green towel got a spot on it from iodine that spilled.   I couldn't use the towel.  I cut it in half. The cut edge was unraveled. I folded it, sewed a narrow hem, rolled the hem and made a French seam that I'd learned to do a million-trillion heart beats ago, when I was learning to make tailored shirts for my husband. Don't ask me why -- was it that gorgeous shirt from a show that someone had designed?  I wanted to make a shirt that style for my man.

So the folded half of the green towel became -- one day, when my studio floor needed to be cleaned -- the cloth I attached to the large broom's brush, a two-foot-long brush that's part of our heavy-duty broom, that we use to sweep the 25 X 45 ft. floor of my dance studio.  With it safety-pinned around the broom's brush, the dust, grit and some of last month's rosin (that I use so I won't slip) were easily picked up. 

Marta, who is a sister whom I pay to come in and clean things once-a-month, used it. She wet the towel, rung out the water, re-safety-pinned it, and damp-mopped.  Enough rosin remained!  She did it last month and this month!  It works!

We celebrated. Marta washed the towel. I put it away and ... well, I don't know where I stashed it. I've looked for it, keep re-tracing the thought I had when I took the damp, half-piece of green towl and hung it up some place, but I can find it.

Each time I see Marta, we say, "Where 's the towel?"

So lost things, are lost, but never do they really disappear from the important place in your mind where you put things that aren't solved, things that you privately, personally,  unimportantly, but importantly need to solve.

If I find the green towel, actually -- after a moment of joy,  that blessed balmy breeze -- well, it won't make much difference.  I'll just have room in my personal lost-and-found, for other, important lost things for me to think about, look for, and try and try, keep trying to find.