Wanted: A scapegoat

A curious thing has been happening at our home. Despite our best efforts to have a "place for everything, and everything in its place," our possessions are not cooperating with that "everything in its place" part.


Instead, they prefer to wander about the house, maybe alighting on a table or bookshelf, or maybe disappearing someplace and never coming back. The kitchen table is one of those places where all kinds of items like to gather, a hangout, a place they can all be together. Sometimes, when they have taken over the whole table and we are wanting to eat dinner, we ask politely if they could share some space.


"Get lost," they say.


We have tried remedial education to get our things to stay in some sort of order. "This is not where you belong," we say. "You go HERE, in the drawer. Not on the table. See, this nice little drawer is just your size. HERE. Not THERE. Repeat after me..."  


I grew up in a household where the same thing happened often. Dishes and glasses would escape the kitchen and multiply in other rooms. Something that my mother had "put right here" would be gone a short time later. We blamed everything on one of my sisters, who continually protested her innocence. After she moved out, and objects kept disappearing or moving, we were forced to admit that possibly we had been wrong all those years. But we never found another explanation.


The Hero and I are likewise mystified when such things occur. Recently our all-purpose scissors, with blue handles, went missing without warning for several days. They reappeared with no explanation of where they had been. I suspected that they were secretly meeting a pair of garden shears at one of the neighbors' houses. Do our scissors, perhaps, have a hidden family somewhere, with baby shears who are the spitting image of our scissors? Or did they just get tired of their close quarters in the drawer and went looking for adventure?


"Oh," said the Hero when I remarked on the scissors' sudden reappearance in the drawer. "I found them with my tools downstairs. Sorry."


My imaginings of secret meetings with the neighbors' garden shears started to vanish. Or maybe...


"Hmmm,"  I said, "you'd better check to see if there's a tiny pair of wire snippers with a blue handle in there, too."