When I lose stuff, I lose it catastrophically. I lost a bunch of jewelry for four years because I forgot an entire compartment existed in my jewelry box. I lost half my cutlery when I moved out of Florida because it was in a ziploc bag inside a box labeled ‘Disney training manuals’ that I didn’t open again until three apartments later. I once lost a hair clip I had been wearing moments before, and found it seven hours later in a box of Town House crackers. I am not good at being an adult human person, is what I’m trying to say.
I think the universe has figured out a workaround to the problem that is me.
First, let me back up: exactly one year ago, I bought a new car. I named him Lando Car-rissian, and he is great. Exactly one week after I bought Lando, I promptly lost one of the two electronic key fobs they gave me. It had only been a week, and I hadn’t gotten around to attaching it to my actual key ring yet (contents: four actual keys, way more than four Star Wars keychains).
At first, I panicked that I must have left it at the grocery store (how, Laura? How could you have done that? How would you have gotten home?) Then, I retraced my steps from the garage to my front door, scanning the ground. I tried starting the car to see if the key was still in there somewhere (it’s one of those fancy cars that starts with a button) and it wasn’t. I checked the pockets of every coat and pair of pants I own, and emptied my purse. I tore through my living room, my kitchen, my bedroom, the goshdarned box of Town House crackers, and any other stupid place I could have stupidly set down a stupid car key when I was being stupid.
I never did find the thing, so I quickly attached the one remaining key to my key ring and have managed to go an entire year without losing or destroying it. A year passed, folks. It rained. It snowed. There were squirrels, and skunks, and stray cats, and many other furry urban creatures. The lawn got mowed. And since my neighbors got a little too judgy about the length of my grass, I now pay other people to mow my lawn, and they do so once a week, and they give it the lawn equivalent of a buzz cut.
And yet, two weeks ago, a mere few days shy of the one-year anniversary of losing the brand-new key to my brand-new car, I was taking stuff out to my garage when I noticed the Hyundai logo poking out of my grass. I knelt down and pried out…Lando’s missing key.
It was wet and crusted with dirt, but for a piece of electronics that just spent an entire year pressed face-down in the mud, it looked remarkably unscathed. I cleaned it off, dried it out, and changed the battery, and it works just fine.
I am completely baffled by the odds of this. Do you know how many times I crossed that section of lawn (often carefully scanning for presents from my neighbor’s unruly, incontinent dog)? Do you know how many times the lawn mower had to have missed it by a hair? Do you understand how much snow piled, and subsequently melted, on top of it this winter? How did this thing come out of all that looking factory-new (once I wiped away the mud, I mean) after surviving a year of all of that?
My brother quickly posited–and this thought had not escaped me, either–that it didn’t. Perhaps, he hinted, the key went on a magical series of misadventures and coincidentally wound up right back in the spot I left it after one full year’s journey. This idea intrigued me.
My own alternate explanation was equally fiction-worthy: that my lawn is actually some kind of time- and space-bending portal that magically spits out all the stuff that I lose.
You may chuckle at the absurdity of this, but my theory was bolstered by further evidence a couple weeks later.
Several years back, I had signed up for one of those subscription boxes that send you a box of little trinkets and collectibles every month, all themed around a specific hobby or interest. One month I got a video game-themed box, and among the tchotchkes was a wristband with the logo for Major League Gaming, which is apparently a thing. I had no particular interest in, or support for, Major League Gaming, but the wristband did come in handy. I used to wear it on my mouse-clicking wrist when writing or playing computer games. It gave me some cushioning and support on that wrist and kept me from getting all achy and carpal-tunnelly. That is, until I lost it. It just disappeared from my spare bedroom/home office one day about three years ago. I always put it in the same spot, and then one day it just…wasn’t in that spot.
And then one garbage night, I was taking my trash out to the curb and was coming back with the very last item of garbage when there, on top of the newly-mown grass, right next to the recycling bin I’d just placed there moments before, was the wristband. I could swear it hadn’t been there when I’d set the recycling bin down, but it was sopping wet, as if it had been sitting out there through the afternoon rain. Apart from being waterlogged, though, it was in good shape, and wasn’t even particularly dirty.
It’s a small and insignificant thing, but such an oddly specific thing that there was almost no possibility that someone else happened to lose one in the vicinity of my house. It was definitely the wristband I had lost years prior, and its presence implied several new, unsettling questions.
How did this thing, which, as far as I’m aware, had never left my spare bedroom, get all the way out to the curb where I put my trash cans? How long had it been there? If it appeared there just after I lost it, that meant that it had suffered through three times as much weather and lawn maintenance as the car key had. Not only that, but the village has been doing a bunch of underground utility work on that particular stretch of curb, and the grass had been dug up with industrial machinery several times and then replaced with new sod. Had it somehow survived all of that? Did it appear outside because I had lost it and needed to find it again, or did I lose it because it popped out of existence in my house and back into existence on my lawn?
The only thing I can say for certain is that my lawn appears to be the place things go when they’re lost.
My family is equally puzzled and delighted by this strange series of events, and I think we’re all kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, here. What will materialize on my lawn next? (It’s also a running gag now; when someone loses something, my brother-in-law is quick to ask, “hold on, did you check Laura’s lawn?”)
My dad and I, having noticed that the latest recovered item was lost longer ago, both had the same prediction: that the lawn portal would continue working its way backwards in time, and churn up the stuff I left in Florida.
Dad recalled that I had left behind some terrible furniture, on purpose, when I left my job at Disney a decade ago and moved several states away: a beat-up couch and an incredibly ugly coffee table. If those things suddenly showed up on my lawn, it would solidify beyond a shadow of a doubt that something paranormal was going on, here.
I didn’t think the couch and coffee table really counted, though, because I didn’t really lose them–I left them behind on purpose. What I did lose in Florida, however, was patio furniture. Over the course of my life, I have had no less than twelve pieces of patio furniture inflicted upon me against my will, regardless of whether or not I actually had a patio on which to place it, and some of it I haven’t managed to get rid of yet. A table and four chairs came with my current house, and the rest of the stuff I currently have, I was ‘volunteered’ for by well-meaning family members who thought I would use it (I do not. Way too much of an audience in my neighborhood.)
But the stuff I had in Florida was actually pretty cute. It was a little wrought-iron table and two chairs that my upstairs neighbors left on my porch when they moved out. I didn’t ask for them, but they looked nice so I hung onto them, and then, because Florida is terrible, someone stole them off my porch. (My apartment complex was extra Floridian. We lost an entire building because someone tried to kill a wasp with fire and chemical accelerant.)
So anyway, ever since the wristband showed up, I’ve just been waiting for the morning when I wake up and there’s patio furniture I haven’t seen in a decade half-buried in my lawn. At that point, I think I’ll be able to assume that the lawn portal is fully up and running. It could bring back everything I’ve ever lost in my entire life. Other people’s stuff might start winding up here. I guess my choices at that point will be to start holding regular yard sales or move.
Laura Writes 