Findings, Part II

Just another trashy post...

Originally posted on FB back in 2014.  Or was it 2015?  

Two days ago, it was Friday the 13th. It started like they all do. Wake before the alarm but lay there and wait for it, filling my mind with ideas for the day ahead. And it's up before 6:00, take out the fluffs and follow my same comfortable routine.

I was just about pour myself a bowl of cardboard flakes for breakfast when I remembered I had a tidy sum of cash in my purse that needed to go into the safe. It had been there since Tuesday but in a rush to get to my torch and make some beads I'd designed in my head (probably that morning before the alarm went off for no reason), I forgot about that sweet envelope.

So, here it was, three days later and I put that cereal box aside and got my purse from the laundry room and went fishing.

In in, I found three pay stubs, seven or eight receipts dating back several months, leftover mortgage statements from December and January, skeletons of bills I'd paid some time ago and a letter from Ebony magazine asking me if I'd like to renew my subscription. Say what??? (NOTE: If you ever order anything from Vista Print, they will gift you with a random magazine subscription.)

I looked again. And again. There was no envelope of dead guys anywhere to be found.

I didn't say anything to Mark Holt or either of my sons and they didn't ask why I was standing at the kitchen bar frantically digging through my purse when I should have been eating my breakfast with three fluffs on my lap while watching the Good Morning Show on WCTV and keeping furry little faces off the rim of my bowl.

I simply put the cereal box back on the shelf, the milk back in the fridge, and my empty, clean cereal bowl in the dishwasher and I drove to work wondering what in the hell happened to Mr. Franklin and his twin brother.

Later that day, I had to take one of my boys to have a little dental procedure done and was prepared to fork over at least as much as I had in that lost envelope. I realized I could have used that to pay for some of the charges, but no, I had lost it. It was gone. And I sat there the entire time he was being worked on and kicked myself over and over and felt really sorry for myself.

Poor me.

No, really, poor me.

When they called me back to tell me my son was going to live and I now owed them money, I braced myself. And the total they socked me with was a fraction of what I'd been told it would be.

My day got brighter. Things were looking up.

When we got home, I immediately looked again for my lost friends.

I looked under my car seats with a flashlight and on my work bench through rods of glass and metal tools and three empty wine glasses and seven Cheetos. (How they get there?)

I tore apart my studio and looked through pockets and dove into the laundry basket.

I was on a mission and I would not stop until I either found it or until Mark Holt got home because I did not want my man to know I had been so careless. I would tell him next year. Or in 2018.

Next, I went exploring in the kitchen trash can. Germ-a-phobic me was grabbing food soaked, dirty paper napkins and gardens of rotting lettuce and crusty paper plates with all manner of dried condiments on them and I didn't care!

I was nearing the bottom of the filth and then there, as wilted as those brown leaves of iceberg lettuce was a wet, garbage stained envelope with some smart, green, righteous fellows inside. I hugged them and asked them how they got in there but they weren't talking and I didn't really care. I just washed them lovingly in the sink, toweled them dry and sat them on my bathroom counter right on top of my box full of MoonDog Mosaics and Artglass necklaces.

So I'd say those fellas had a pretty good Friday the 13th, getting rescued from the trash like that. Now I've gotta go break it to them that it's time for me to lock them away. Put 'em in that cold, dark safe. Maybe they'll make some friends in there.

As for me, I'm going to get a smaller purse and take care of sensitive matters in a timely manner from now on.

And I might just go digging through my trash more often...