When I was in Seattle, a few weeks pregnant with Lea, so that has been over 12 years ago, I left a green rain jacket on a rail like that one in the photo.



I left it there because I was late. In a panic I considered going back and even if I missed my plane, I impulsively considered taking a later flight so I could find it. But, it was a red-eye and Nicholas was only 7, so I had to go. I begged my friend who I'd been visiting to please go and retrieve it for me. She said she would and I boarded the plane.


My heart was in my throat the entire way to Houston and then on to Ohio. I watched my little boy sleep and I read to him some of the time. When I arrived home I called her right away and asked her if she'd found it, my fingers hopefully crossed, and she said when she went back to the rail where I'd hung it, she said that she had tried, but it was gone.


A sucker punch to the soul. I went to my knees, devastated.


I didn't believe her. I didn't believe that she tried, I mean. For me, I would have searched for it until I found it. Because I've been so stubborn as a searcher for lost things and believing that there is always a way to find or fix anything. I can't help it that I would have needed to find it, not just given up because I was scared to ask someone, or too tired or lazy. I'm compelled to believe in this way. It's what I have, it's my way of faith. It's my short life's eternal.


In the days after in my imagination when I could bear to consider it, I believed that someone picked it up and took it into the building. It was in the lost and found in a box, in a drawer or behind a desk and it would have been there and waiting for me. I knew that when I got it back I would have put my hand inside the right pocket, and in deep relief I would've found the used tissue of living molecules and the wrapped Werther's candy that my mother had left there the weekend before she died, and a year later remained there for safe-keeping.