I was 2000 miles away from home and initially only knew one person. I was lucky enough to have all of my immediate family members visit me at some point during my one year out there. My mom was kind enough to help me with the two and a half day drive out to Arizona, and to help me get settled into my temporary housing situation. A few months later my brother and his then-girlfriend-now-wife made Phoenix (and my house and my washing machine and my pool) a stop on their cross country journey. My sister flew out just before my Spring Break to hang out and then we flew back together to CLE so I could co-host her baby shower.
My dad came out in February with his then girlfriend. They spent the majority of their time in Sedona, where dad cashed in on some timeshare condo points. It was Presidents Day weekend, so I had a nice three days to drive up into the red rocks with them and enjoy a bit of less-sweltering Arizona. While we were up there I fell in love with a simple pair of turquoise button earrings. I saw them in a gift shop on the main drag and I himmed and hawed about purchasing them and ultimately decided not to at that point (which, I can't be certain why. They couldn't have been that expensive, but alas, I didn't buy them). I left Sedona on Monday earringless and headed back to Phoenix. Dad was still in Sedona for the remainder of the week and I couldn't get these earrings out of my mind. I had to have them. So I called him and kindly asked if he would return to the gift shop where I saw them and pick me up a pair, preferably with as little veining as possible.
Later that week they drove back down to Phoenix from Sedona and dad gave me the most perfect pair of turquoise earrings right there in the Tempe In-n-Out Burger parking lot. Since that day I have more or less exclusively worn those earrings.
And since that day I have lost one of those earrings in very wacky places at various times; all places where one would never expect to recover a missing item, and yet, these earrings have nine lives and they find their way back to me each time.
The first time I lost on was the summer that my now 4 year old nephew was an infant. My sister and I would pack the boys up and head out to the community pool at least once a week. One day during the rest period I decided to try my hand at dive off of the diving board (as any self respecting 30 something woman would do). Several hours later when my sister and I were in the grocery store parking lot debating what to get for dinner I realized an earring was missing. I was devastated. Katie called the pool the next morning and even went to search the pool deck for the missing earring. She asked if they had run the pool vacuum that night, and they had, and the pool worker said that it was possible that it didn't get picked up, it might have been too big.
We returned to the pool the next day, as we were wont to do, and again, we went over to the diving well during rest period. Some teenaged boys were doing flips and dives off the board to the amusement of the little kids around. One of these boys lost a gage from his ear and was swimming down to the bottom to try to retrieve it. I asked him if, while he was down there, he might look for a small earring that is roughly the same color as the bottom of the pool, please and thank you. Much to my delight he found it! And earring and I were reunited for the first time!
The second occurrence was this past winter. I needed to attend a masters class down on campus on Thursday nights. It was the bane of my existence. I dreaded going and hated every second of being there. I digress. My car was parked in a poorly kept city lot, which was much cheaper than a campus lot. I walked myself back to my car after a long day at work, followed by a long night in class, and took my cross-body purse off of my shoulder and immediately knew my right earring was gone. And the probability of it being in the poorly plowed city lot was good. So I got on my hands and knees and looked in the driver side of my car and under my car and in the snowy parking lot. Not luck. And then something told me to look in my back seat. I reached my hand through the space between the driver door and the back seat and felt something roundish with my fingers. With excitement in my heart I opened the back door to see the earring sitting there on the floor of my car.
The most recent time I lost an earring was just a few weeks ago. It was a particularly busy Wednesday. I was at work, briefly came home to change clothes and head to CrossFit, came home with just enough time to microwave something for dinner and then head out the door to a union meeting back in the town I teach in, which is about 25 minutes away. It was during that meeting, at about 8pm that I realized my right earring was once again missing. In my gut I knew I had not lost it at the meeting. I searched around me but knew it was gone. I wasn't hopeful in the slightest considering all of the places I had been that day, and the number of places where the earring could possibly be. I sent a plea out to my CrossFit's Facebook group to see if anyone had stumbled upon it. I searched the clothes I wore that day to school to see if it had fallen out when I was changing clothes. Not there. I went in to school the next day and prayed that a custodian had found it on the ground near my desk. No luck. I had resolved that I would never see it again.
I had a brilliant idea to go to the local jeweler, whom I had worked with on a few other occasions, to see if they could order a stone to match and make me a new earring. The owner more or less dismissed my request and said that it was hardly worth it to even attempt that route and that I should pretty much give up.
Fast-forward to today. I got a bee in my bonnet this morning to get some real Spring Autumn Cleaning done around my place. My bedroom is severely inadequate in size and I've never really found a way for it to work for me, which is to all say that my room is routinely in a state of "roach coach." It's not fit for company. But today I was going to tackle my Mount Everest. I through away 4 bags of trash, I donated 5 bags of clothing, I dusted the heck out of my baseboards, and I rearranged some of my furniture. At one point during my cleaning I looked down and saw something sort of shiny. I bent down to pick it up, and lo and behold, it was my earring. The post was slightly bent and there was no back on it, but there it was!
I need to find a better way to secure these suckers to my ears, but somehow they have magical powers. We were always meant to be together, those earrings and me.
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