When I got the prompt “Lost Serially” yesterday from Writing101, I was less than enthused, but willing to give it a go. For a day I started cataloguing things that I had lost recently. It was not a very long list and that was a bit of a surprise. I don’t tend to lose stuff. I used to. Frequently. When we first moved to Boston from Cincinnati, we had to paint and scrub our apartment in Brighton before it was fit for habitation. I took off my rings: a sapphire ring which my father had given me as a high school class ring; and my sapphire engagement ring. I managed to lose both of them but that story is for a later post.

What does it mean to lose something? Does something qualify as “lost” only if you lose it permanently? Or does something qualify as “lost,” if you can’t find it for a certain period of time? I think if you lose something and it causes heart ache and a frantic search, then it falls in the category of lost items — even if the said items are eventually recovered.

Silk worm cocoons in a bowl; these are not dyed.

These mittens don’t look like much. And they are not really. Except they are hand made from beginning to end. A friend gave me a set of silk hankies which (for those who don’t know) are a stack of fine, fine layers of silk taken from silk worm cocoons. To make the yarn for knitting, you separate each layer from the hanky and stretch it into a loop from the center

A silk hanky

and keep pulling and pulling until you have the diameter yarn you want. You “break” the loop and then you wind it onto a tube. You keep repeating the process until you have used all the layers. You connect the yarn by overlapping the ends and rubbing them together until they cling. I made at least 400 yards of single-ply silk yarn in this way. It took a long time and I had to be careful to keep my nails and cuticles smooth so the yarn would not catch.

When the yarn was made, I knitted the mittens. That took more time and I realized that next time I should not pull the silk into such a fine thread.

Those mittens were so warm! Silk insulates marvellously. I wore them all the time but not when shovelling or dog walking.

Last year I took them with me to run an errand on a rainy winter day and managed to lose them. I did not realize that I had lost them at that moment. I was too distracted talking to my children. It was not until a day or two later when I could not find them anywhere in the house that I started to get really worried.

I searched everywhere. Nothing.

Then as a last resort because I remembered I last had them on this errand, I drove to the little town and parked near where I had parked before.

There they were! Someone had laid them on the park bench. They looked beddraggled and dirty but there they were!