Lost and found, redux

Both of us spend increasing amounts of time searching for lost things (I, R says, finally crossed over to geezer-hood the other day when I went in search of my glasses while they were resting firmly on my nose), but another in a string of all-too-frequent searchs yesterday (Sunday) took on an almost surreal quality. For about 45 minutes, I had been sitting in bed next to R reading to him. Then my voice got tired and he got sleepy, so I decided to make a small salad and he flipped the TV. At some point between the bedroom and the kitchen, I lost my reading glasses. Both of us searched and searched for the glasses off and on for the rest of the evening, but they had simply vanished. Although I happen to like this particular pair of readers, it was not a major catastrophe, because I have about six other pairs of readers in different strengths scattered about the house in various and sundry places, and so it was mostly just a simple matter to find another pair and put them on. But it was the principle of the thing. Where the heck were my glasses? R says “Tomorrow morning, go to the Dollar Store and buy another pair, and eventually the ones you lost will turn up.” After one last furtive look around the edge of the bed, we went to bed.

At about 11:30, a storm starts to track through the area: lots of cloud-to-cloud lightening, near-continuous thunder, rain hammering down, hard. Then about midnight, I hear the wail of the tornado siren in town. “Wake up, wake up, the tornado siren just went off.” He was sound asleep, but not any more. So then we’re up stumbling around the house with the police scanner tuned to the National Weather Service listening to the warnings for our county (...tornado warning.... Dopplar radar... severe thunerstorm capable of producing a tornado... potential for baseball-sized hail...) and trying to decide if we should go the basement. We decided to go back to bed (gee, is that really a freight train I am hearing, or is this a tornado on the ground). The storm quickly passed through – we didn’t even loose power and no hail. By 1 a.m. the sky had cleared, the full moon was riding high in the sky, and then the coyotes started howling not too far off and the Spring Peepers throttled up (see previous post).... just another Spring night in the Ozarks.

Oh yeah, this morning when I went to the kitchen to rinse out last night’s coffee cup, I found my glasses at the bottom of a pan of murky water that had been sitting there all night, soaking, to loosen the crust of a dessert I had baked. How in the world did they end up in the pan in the sink? Who knows.