A few weeks back, I couldn’t find my keys. It’s not that uncommon a thing, though they normally hang inside the lock of the door so that I can find them easily. So, I went through the house looking in the usual places: my handbag, my coat pocket, the dining room table.No keys.
In the end, I took the spare keys to the house, and borrowed my husband’s keys to the car. When I returned home, I looked for the keys again, and again and again, with no result.
Finally, I remembered Saint Anthony, that great finder of all lost things. “Saint Anthony,” I called aloud, “I need you. It’s those ****in’ keys again.”
When the keys made no appearance for the rest of the day, I supposed that himself didn’t like to hear me swearing when I called him, so I made my apology early in the morning and asked again, more politely. Days later, there were still no sign of the keys.
I put aside everything then, and deep cleaned all the well-traveled areas of the house, pulling out the sofa, cleaning the refrigerator, emptying the laundry baskets by washing seven loads in a single day, and still no keys. It was bewildering; calling Saint Anthony had never failed before. By suppertime I was desperate, and tried the slightly more formal plea to the Saint-Who-Finds-Things:
Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come down: Something is lost and can’t be found.
A few hours later, I thought I had my answer: I suddenly thought of the car. Perhaps I’d let them slip under the seat while unpacking groceries, or maybe one of the children had gone out to fetch something from the car and dropped the keys then.
I searched the car more thoroughly than a Customs Official–but, no keys. I did find a fifty-euro note under the passenger seat, and couldn’t help but wonder if that was my answer, after all. We’d speculated that perhaps our baby daughter who LOVES a big bunch of keys may have found them lying on the dining room table, unluckily within reach, then dumped them into her favourite hiding place: the kitchen garbage bin. After two weeks, it certainly seemed possible that they were gone forever, and that poor Saint Anthony had simply left me a clue that I no longer needed a search, but a locksmith.
So, I gave up. The next day was terrible.
You know what Those Days are like: you wake up wrong, you fall on your way out of bed, the phone’s ringing and it’s not good news, the post arrives and the news is worse, you don’t feel well and you’re late getting the kids to school and the baby throws up on herself in the car and then throws up on you when you lift her out. Only when you’re home again do you discover you’re out of bread and milk and a few more things, and the phone is ringing again, the dryer breaks and suddenly, you realise you’ve lost the Last Set of Keys…again. Every moment took me from bad to worse.
And it was supposed to be Christmas holidays on top of it all, making being miserable even more miserable than it would have been otherwise…and I had turned into a likeness of the grumpy old Grinch.
Being Grinchy and tired and overwhelmed sent me into a spiral of self-pity, so that when the poor baby was finally down for her nap, I abandoned all the things I meant to do, and should have done (including looking for those bloody keys). I decided to revisit my childhood instead, and cheer myself up a little by watching that old Grinch cartoon. It had been a long long time since I’d taken the time to relax on a sofa and watch the television, so perhaps I could un-misery myself this way. Or so I thought.
Finding the Grinch, however, took some hunting–we hadn’t opened it since last Christmas after all. So I was down on my knees, reaching back into the far corner of the TV cabinet among the videos and DVDs there, when, lifting the red-and-green box that I thought likely Grinch-looking, I heard,
ker-PLINK
–the unmistakable sound of keys.
They were there in the back of the cabinet, and suddenly I could see the perfect likelihood of it. Baby likes to unpack the DVDs into a pile, and she had probably done so before spotting the keys on the dining room table–which she then stowed in the empty dark cabinet. Someone else came along and not noticing the keys, tidied the DVDs and videos back into place (it was probably myself!) which hid the keys completely from sight, for two and a half long weeks.
Thank you Baby, for not putting them in the bin, or the toilet.
Thank you Saint Anthony, for the Very Bad Day that made me look there at last, and find my keys. I’m taking very good care of them, ever since.
My childhood summers were spent in old woodland, where the trees stood together in a sort of green-roofed cathedral filled with shifting sunlight and shadow, and the floor of it was a springy carpet of pine needles, leaf mould, and damp-smelling earth. It was heaven to me.
