If you’ve kept up with my diaries, you know that ghosts have been lounging around our apartment. It appears that we’ve been invaded by faerys as well. In the old days, they were feared because, among other things, they were known to steal things, sometimes even people, even babies.
The faeryfolk of the past were not Tinkerbelles. They were a terrifying and dangerous presence in the world of the Celtic peoples. But also puckish and well capable of doing the unexpected.
Just last night they–or something–did the unexpected in our life. Something lost has reappeared.
Like most people who’ve gone through chemotherapy, I’ve been left with pretty patchy hair. (Whitley says that I look like a cat with mange, and I have to agree. He adds, ‘a pretty cat, though.’ Hope so, hub!) So I’ve been wearing wigs, and there was one that was my favorite, and I always got compliments when I wore it, so I wore it almost every day. I came out one morning recently and looked for the wig, and it was inexplicably gone. I thought, ‘we’ve been invaded by thieving faerys,’ but the true story turned out to be much more prosaic: somebody trying to be helpful put the wig into the wash, leaving it looking a bit like a used feather duster.
That was an explained loss, but now there’s an unexplained recovery, and it’s pretty incredible.
I have been missing one of my favorite sweaters for weeks now, and I assumed that I left it in a restaurant or at a friends’ house. I found it this morning dumped on the floor of my closet. It hadn’t been there before. It had just reappeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and this time there is no logical explanation.
From Whitley:
I’ll take responsibility for the wig. It somehow fell into the wash and I didn’t find it in time. But the sweater is a genuine mystery. I have been looking for it for weeks, including in the precise place where Anne found it. It was lying on the floor of her closet in plain sight, and it is not possible that we could have overlooked it. Just yesterday, I was in that closet getting another sweater for her, and once again I took a look around. The floor was empty.
This morning, when she announced that she’d found the sweater on the floor, I thought, ‘dear God, she wants it so much she’s dreaming about it.’ I started to commiserate, but then–incredibly–there it was. She was right. It had reappeared.
Now, this is not the first time something like this has happened in our life. Years ago, I fell into the water at night in a marina and lost my glasses in the process. The glasses were unique, in that they had been repaired, but because they were European, the screw used to reattach the broken fret was a little different from the original screw on the other side.
I got new glasses and forgot about the incident. Two years passed. One morning I woke up and, to my astonishment, the old glasses, complete with the mismatched screw, were lying on the little table beside my bed.
This was impossible. It could not have happened. But it did. Ditto the sweater. It was nowhere in this house, and certainly not in Anne’s closet. But now it’s back and she’s wearing it.
A delightful reminder that we know so very little about the world around us.
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I have had these kinds of
I have had these kinds of events ever since I can remember (it was annoying in childhood and it is annoying now) — losing things — having them reappear exactly where I just looked a billion times. I have always kept an eye open for theories in the literature and I dont remember hearing fairies before but I have heard leprechauns can be particularly mischievious. My favorite is a theory that one’s attention is so focused on the object one is looking for — that some people actually vibrate things out of site by raising the energy level of the object they are looking for. When they give up on it, the energy decreases and the object “reappears.” I really liked that theory for a long time. But I moved on to fluctuating timelines — kinda my current favorite. Fairies are probably more fun and a lot prettier, tho . . . And maybe you can convince them to stop being so mischievious. They also may be helpful at moving missing objects from one place to another (like maybe where you can see them . . .). Please keep us posted 🙂
@Missing items:
Leaving
@Missing items:
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of who or what may be responsible for missing items, I am struck by how we all respond when it happens. We look in the most logical place first – where the object was last seen or where we would keep when it was not in use. When we can’t find it, we expand the search area. If we still don’t find it, we extend the area again but eventually we all go back and search the original location. Not just a second time but again and again and again. What makes us keep doing this? Do we doubt the evidence of our senses? Do we believe we might have “missed something”? Or are we acting on a deeper impulse: a sense that the item will someday show up right where it should be so we keep ‘checking’ that place until either we become convinced that the item is forever gone or we simply give up. Whitley’s experience with his spectacles is perhaps the strangest incident because of the great lapse of time between losing the specs in the water and suddenly finding them again in his home. Spectacles are costly and we don’t replace things like that unless we are convinced that there is no hope of recovering them. And yet, Whitley’s specs found their way out of the water in the harbour and into his home. We may never know why such items are “taken” or why they are inexplicably “returned”. We don’t know whether some sort of anomalous energy shift can cause us “temporary blindness” in us (both physical and psychological), or whether some entities are removing the items from us for a purpose we don’t fathom.
All my life I have followed the pattern I described above when things go missing but this is the first time I thought to question why I continue to repeat the search ritual when it fails to produce results. Could there be some vestigial memory of having had the experience before – in other lifetimes – when items mysteriously re-appeared so that there is some unconscious or semi-conscious expectation that if we look long enough the item will come back to us – courtesy of the Faery Folk? Or Aliens? And if so, what else in our behavioural patterns may relate to them?
Very cool story about getting
Very cool story about getting your things back. Be well.
My daughter also locates lost
My daughter also locates lost things for me. A week after she died in 2003, I was furious with my husband because I found a dime on the kitchen floor. He collected coins, and we had a toddler at the time who would put anything in his mouth. He picked it up and went pale. It was a French centime (dime) he had loaned her 3 years before in Atlanta for a school project, and she’d lost it and been so sad. We found the centime in Texas. We knew it was her way of showing us how cool it was on the other side…She’s also returned a very special earring I’d lost in the snow 200 miles away from home, and it reappeared in the middle of the kitchen floor. Other items have shown up after years as well, usually left in plain sight where the finder would know it was “given back” to us as a little dig about their relative power and awesomeness compared to us.