A Good Result from an Accident / Musings on the Loss of Objects

The other night, an accident had a good end result. Here's what happened.

While we were watching TV, sitting as usual on the smaller of our two couches, I accidentally spilled almost an entire large cup of black tea plus milk on the hardwood floor and rug. Furious at myself for my clumsiness, I started madly mopping up the mess with paper towels. It had made quite a large puddle, part of which was under the couch.

Thinking that some tea might still be under the couch after all my mopping, I asked David to help me pull the couch away from the wall. To my huge surprise, there under the couch was the portable cell phone charger I thought I had lost on campus months before. (It's the kind that looks like a thin cell phone.) How it got under the couch, I have no idea. It was not wet, and it seems to work fine.

Do any of the rest of you have stories of long-lost things you found? If so, I'd like to read them.

Finding the charger made me feel a lot better about spilling the tea, and the floor and rug seem to be okay. The floor has polyurethane on it.

However, I still can't find the camera I lost over a year ago, one with many irreplaceable photos on it that I had not yet downloaded to the computer. Some photos were of my sister Laura's dear little cat, Amelia, who died of old age not long after I took those photos.

Over the years, I have lost many other cherished items, and thinking of them still makes me sad. A few of them were stolen, some of them were lost through my own carelessness, and all of them were irreplaceable.

I once had an acquaintance more or less laugh at me and the idea of being sad about losing cherished items, stating that they were "just things." His opinion is that one should never become attached to inanimate objects.

I assume that his attitude is extremely unusual. Whether or not it's admirable and worthy of emulation, I can't really say. For my own part, I'd rather have my feelings of attachment, even if the result is sometimes sadness and a seemingly permanent sense of loss.