Welcome to my first newsletter on substack.com. For anyone who has followed me through letters from my travels, through medium.com, or from my most recent newsletter “Updates from Meg,” thank you for sticking with me! I like the fact that substack.com has a place for you to comment with insights of your own. If you’re someone who’s just stumbled into my corner, welcome and thanks for being here! As you can see, I aim to write about things both lost & found.
Several years ago, when my husband and I were driving up the eastern coast of Italy at the beginning of a 3-month trip, we stopped to swim in the Adriatic Sea. Having apparently lost our wits, we locked our rental car and walked across the street to a near-empty beach with lounging lifeguards and a few September sunbathers. After floating on waves under a clear blue sky and lunching on leftover bread and cheese, we returned to our car.
We found two policemen examining its broken windows. One said, “Did you have luggage?”
At the police station, in Italian we didn’t understand, we were instructed to list our losses in English they couldn’t read. We scrounged our brains to remember what was gone.
Everything: luggage, passports, computers, cell phones, clothes, money…
Thus began our most memorable retirement adventure. What we found was far more valuable than what we lost: helpful strangers, a deep realization of the privileges we carry, a glimpse into the trauma of having everything gone in a foreign land.
Retirement itself was a kind of lost & found. Unable to continue the work I loved after marshaling my mother through dementia to her death, nonetheless I gradually found myself, with time and new perspective.
And then, the pandemic! I’ll never not remember my sadness during the holidays of 2020, when our forever-traditions gave way to a tiny cluster of us huddled outside around a stove and wrapped in blankets as we carved a Christmas turkey. In spite of it all, companionship held sway.
When I was a child, I used to go ice-skating at a nearby rink. Occasionally, when the ice had gotten chopped up and uneven from all the blades, we’d have to clear the rink. Waiting impatiently during the break, I would search the lost & found for a mitten or sock I’d dropped, never finding a single one. As I search my memory now, what I find is the feeling of launching my wobbly legs back onto the ice, so fresh & clean & empty, after the Zamboni had done its work.
After that fateful trip when everything was lost, we were fortunate to be able to replenish. Most fortunate, though, is that we’ve never lost the insights or gratitude we found along the way.
This newsletter will tend toward telling stories about things lost &/or found — maybe monthly.
Perhaps you’ll think of something to share yourself — if so, please leave your thoughts in the comments or get in touch!
And, unrelated, here’s the last of fall, giving way to winter, in our maple tree…
And day, giving way to night, on Hood Canal…
Things come & go…
yes
things do come and go
(as the tides)
thanks once again
for your insightful observations!
Lovely writing & lovely images!