Chapter 19 #2
Then I calm down and message Keri back, telling her how much this pleases me, that I’ll drop it in the mail in the coming days, and that I’d love a picture of her with the album to share online since I know people will enjoy seeing the satisfying outcome.
After my heart rate eventually settles, I open the next private message—and wow.
Just wow. The other photo album has been claimed, too!
By a grandchild of the people in the pictures.
I stop, lean back in my chair, and suddenly feel like I’m doing something really good here.
Something that matters and will make a difference in people’s lives.
In only a small way, maybe, but it’s true that sometimes the small things are the big things. I can feel in both of these messages just how important it is to these people to be reclaiming their lost memories.
In fact, this feels like ... when I deliver the evening news on Channel 11. Like I’m providing a service, doing something relevant. This is the most relevant I’ve felt in a long time.
Part of me wants to laugh deliriously, and part of me wants to cry with pent-up emotion—but rather than give in to either urge, I put on my game face and get back to work. That’s what this is to me now: a sacred sort of work, a labor of love.
I go to the original posts and edit them to include a new caption: **Items claimed and owners found!
** I explain a bit, of course leaving out names.
I also see that the posts were shared hundreds of times, which explains how they reached the right people.
So I thank everyone on my page for sharing, and then I see .
.. holy crap, I’ve gained ten thousand new followers in the past week.
Just from all this sharing. People like helping lost things find their way home.
I dive into crafting new posts—for the music box I texted Sydney about, for a family Bible where the birth and death entries end in 1956, and for another photo album, this one appearing to have belonged to a young woman in the 1980s.
Lastly, I put Thomas B. Hartfell out there, too.
I explain the photo was found in Jackson, Mississippi, estimating the year.
And I hope the same miracle occurs for these items as for my two claimed photo albums.
I take a look at the teddy bear post and see lots of comments that don’t really go anywhere, but I’m still holding out hope that Liza will somehow magically materialize—and given that it’s been shared seven hundred and fifty-six times, I have faith.
I leave the library with a kick in my step, and I’m walking toward my car when I spot a Dollar Tree down the street.
On impulse, I bypass the car and go to the store instead, heading straight for the school supply section.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I select a colorful binder, some loose-leaf notebook paper, a pack of colored ink pens, and some sticky notes.
Keeping a lost-and-found log in my laptop would make so much more sense and be so much easier and quicker in so many ways, but somehow I want to hold it in my hands.
I want to fill it with color and flourishes and my own handwriting.
The way Mabel would have done if she’d started one back when the items first arrived in Lost and Found.
I’m almost surprised there isn’t one, in fact—but maybe it seemed pointless. Now, though, it’s not.
The long days of summer are upon us, darkness not falling until after nine—though twilight does seem to arrive a little earlier here, tucked down between the Kentucky mountains.
After I grill a chicken breast and add it to a salad, I take an evening walk over to the winery.
It’s still hot out, even at this hour, but more tolerable than earlier.
Jo tells me she and Conrad have been enjoying the blackberries, and Conrad passes by, announcing that I’ve given him an idea for blackberry wine.
Then he asks me to taste test a few versions of a Chardonnay-type blend he’s been working on, and I gladly oblige.
Returning home, I see Grace sitting on her front porch, so I go tell her about finding homes for the two photo albums and that Mr. Hartfell is now out there for people to see, too. She claps her hands together in joy, then invites me to sit with her for a few minutes and look at the sky.
Joining her, I follow her eyes upward. It’s still an hour until sunset, but all the signs of day’s end are already there, in unusual ways. Dark blue-gray wispy clouds waft fast and furious across a larger pink-cloud backdrop, moving like smoke in the wind.
Grace says, “Cain’t say I’ve ever seen clouds like that before.”
I haven’t, either. “Do you think it’s going to storm?”
“No.” She sounds very sure, like a woman who knows the sky well.
We keep watching the clouds drifting speedily past, like they’re in a hurry to get somewhere. After a few minutes in silence, I ask, “What do you think is making that happen?”
“God,” she answers.
“God?”
“Everything’s God, ya know. The world’s a beautiful mystery.”
Now Grace’s face draws my attention more than the sky—I watch her looking up at those clouds with wonder and reverence. I watch her seeing God.
I wonder if Mabel saw God in the clouds on her ceiling.
These are very different, of course—dark blue on a sea of neon pink, ghosts in the breeze—but I see it, too, the beautiful mystery of it all.
As we watch quietly, taking in the subtle majesty, there’s no place I’d rather be right now. I sit stunned by the beauty.
It’s so many different things, beauty. A pretty face, a piece of art, a night sky. Maybe even a face that isn’t pretty. Beauty goes much deeper in ways I’m only just beginning to understand.