Gone

After downsizing and moving into a smaller place I sometimes cannot remember where I chose to put things. Part of the problem might be because, thankfully, I had help settling in. Those feelings of relief can register as perplexity months later—where ARE my little binoculars?

Things gone missing can be slightly annoying, especially when living on a fixed income limits the option to just buy a replacement. Fortunately, practicing gratitude rescues feelings of loss most of the time: I love my cottage-like dwelling space; I’m comforted by quietness punctuated by birdsong; my grandsons visit regularly on their own volition.

I wrote recently about being gifted my mother’s diaries many years after her passing. Profoundly grateful for these unexpected treasures, they promised disclosure of many years blank to my childhood memories. Five diaries going from 1941 through 1963, two of them 5-year journals—I would read them consecutively, patiently, hungerly. It would be an expedition in which I would become less unacquainted with my own history.

Then, in the middle of discovery, a revelation. A 5-year diary is missing: 1948-1952, smack dab in the middle of my childhood. Do I faintly remember my brother telling me he had destroyed some of my mother’s writings because he felt they were harmful? At the time what he said must have flown over my head like a wind-driven cloud quickly dissipating into a vast sky-dome of incomprehensibility. Now, even a hint of such a memory is perplexing. All I know is, one of my mother’s diaries is gone.

I’m left with a choice: acceptance or denial. I can make up stories in my head, hope the diary is simply misplaced, eventually to be discovered where the other diaries were, in a messy garage in southern California underneath piles of forgotten miscellany. Or I can seek out my steadfast companion, gratitude.

It will take time. I’ll sit in my cottage-like dwelling listening to nature’s lovely, unsolicited winged chorale outside. I will measure time by what holds true: I am safely bound by familial love, unwavering friendships, and by the promise of discoveries yet unimagined. I will not mourn what is gone; I rejoice in life one heartbeat at a time.

P.S. I did find my small binoculars!