Lost and Found

When I travel I like to buy souvenirs that I will use on a regular basis. I like things that remind me of the places I have been, yet have a function.

As a result of my peripatetic life, I have a stack of thick wool blankets from Guatemala, hand carved wooden spoons from Latvia, and table linens from Romania. I also have a pair of prized woolen mittens from Estonia.

The Estonians, they know cold. They also know their sheep and how to spin a thick, soft wool unlike any I have ever found anywhere else in the world. On a trip to Tallinn way back in the winter of 2005, I bought a pair of double lined wool gray mittens at an outdoor market . They sustained me through -30 Fahrenheit weather in Riga and weeks of snow in Bucharest.

Last Friday I emerged from the metro and my regular "it's Friday and I really need something to get me going" trip to Starbucks. (This rationale actually works quite well for every day of the week.) I reached into my purse to put on my mittens and only found one.

You know that child's poem about the three little kittens? Well, I spent the rest of the weekend meowing and searching for my lost mitten. It was ridiculous really, a small unimportant thing in the grand scale of things. But since I have had children I feel like I have lost entire continents without knowing. And that really irks me.

And thinking back to that now long ago trip to Estonia, I remembered driving back from Tallinn with my husband, in the no-man's-land on the border between Estonia and Latvia. It was there, on a long gray road tended by surly border guards that I came to the decision that I was ready to become a mother. Why there, I don't know. Maybe the car trip was just too uneventful with just two adults. But after that trip we decided to have a baby and I had Miss Bee and the mittens were somehow inextricably wrapped up in all that.

But then I found the missing mitten today, in the restroom at work. Miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously, the cleaning crew did not throw it away over the weekend, and some helpful person placed it right on the mirror where I would find it. And I am embarrassed to admit that I rejoiced.

It is the little things, you know? A lost mitten found; a handmade card from my daughter; a dinner alone with my husband . . . There are just so many small joys in life that are too easily overlooked.