"Honey, have you seen the...?"

So, how much time do you spend every day searching for things are not actually lost, just “temporarily misplaced?” Because this is such a problem for us, and seems to get worse day-by-day, some time ago, Richard made a sign

 and put several of them around the house to remind us to put things back.

Do we put things back? Sometimes, but more frequently, we do not.

One morning last week, he put an altered sign on my desk.

 "This is my reality," he says.

I had a good laugh, but I wasn’t laughing later that afternoon when I was preparing dinner and needed the lid for my 1-quart casserole.

I opened the cabinet where it is supposed to live. It was not there. Richard was in the kitchen, so I asked him if he knew where it was. He also opened the cabinet and looked, and he agreed that it wasn’t there. We looked in the dish drainer, on the counter next to the microwave, on top of microwave. No lid.

I was very exasperated by the time I did find it. My big cast iron skillet mostly sits on the back burner of the stove. The last time I had used the casserole, I had put the lid in the cast iron skillet, and then later had put the lid for my 6-quart soup pot on top of it.

Richard needed the big clippers to trim some small branches hanging over the driveway. He couldn’t find them anywhere, and wanted to know if I had seen them. I hadn’t, but decided to help look for them. I searched all the likely places. Then I thought to look in the back of the truck, just for the heck of it, and there they were.

He had driven the truck down the driveway several days earlier with the tools (including the clippers) he needed to clear a brush dam that had caused the wet weather spring, which has been flowing for quite a while, to run like a river down our driveway instead of flowing through the culvert. He had left everything in the back of the truck when he finished but had forgotten that’s where they were.

Richard often takes the small cutting board into his office when he wants to chop vegetables for our salad or slice apples or orange because his back hurts if he stands too long at the kitchen counter.

Yesterday I heard him rummaging around in the kitchen. “Leilani Lee (uh oh! Mom and dad never used our middle names unless they were really annoyed with us), what did you do with the blue cutting board?”

“I didn’t do anything with it,” I fired back. The cutting board is one thing I always put in the dish drainer to dry when it has been washed or hang on the nail when it is dry. “You probably took it into your office to use. That’s probably where it is.” Sure enough, it was in his office, probably right where he had left it.

And of course that brings up the other problem of not being able to see something that is almost right in front you but perhaps not quite where you were expecting to see it.

If we could just put everything back where it belongs the problem would be solved, but I don’t think that is going to happen. So we will likely keep on muddling along.