I lost a pair of scissors, yesterday.
You can stop reading now if this feels too banal for your tastes.
It was a bizarre happening for a really unremarkable household item, and it is really pissing me off.
I have had the same pair of scissors for forty years. They were gifted to me as a bridal shower gift. The gift giver has long been forgotten. Henckel's. They are truly the best. The lesson here is to always buy the best you can afford because cheap garbage simply doesn't last. (I also have been using the same hand-held can opener for four decades. Sometimes, you can't go wrong with quality.) I love these scissors so much that I bought an identical pair for The Southern Home twenty-five years ago.
The scissors hang on a knife rack in the kitchen of The Southern Home. The only time they have been moved to a different location was when we renovated the kitchen. When we reconstructed, the scissors found their way home to the knife rack above the sink. Yes, I am a creature of habit. Yes, I like order. Yes, I suggest that until you have walked around my addled brain, you shouldn't judge me.
Yesterday, the scissors went walkabout.
I didn't notice their absence until I went to make dinner. Some items require a scissors instead of a knife. There was a hole on the knife rack where the scissors previously were.
I queried The Husband. He looked perplexed. He remarked that he thought he heard something fall a few hours prior, but would have noticed the scissors in the sink had they tumbled from their lofty perch.
We employed a cleaning woman yesterday and wondered if she might have borrowed them to open a package of cleansers. Before you all go accusing this lovely woman, stop right there. She is someone I have known for decades. She is one of the few people on the planet shorter than me, (not really relevant, but a fun fact) and she has no problem helping me practice my ugly Spanish. I do the same for her in English, and we meet somewhere in the linguistic middle. She is a trustworthy human and I will not hear one word against her character from the nattering nabobs of the intertoobs. We also pondered the possibility of her nudging the scissors with a duster or a cloth. It would explain the clatter The Husband heard, but the logical conclusion of that scenario is that we would have found them in the sink.
We embarked on a fruitless search. This place isn't that big. There aren't a lot of locations a scissors could decamp to for a rest day. Drawers were emptied, shelves were scrutinized, and garbage was sifted, all to no avail. We are without answers and without shears. The only possible answer we can come up with is that they bounced out of the sink and into the cleaners' open trash bag. It would have been a bank shot worthy of Minnesota Fats, but even a one-in-a-million carom is still achievable. She probably never noticed, and she tossed the trash when she left. Until the f***ing things reveal themselves, I am going with this storyline.
As angry as I am with Jeff Bezos, Amazon is still a wondrous thing. A replacement pair will be here today.
So, why am I boring you all with this insanity? It really isn't important at all. Nobody died or got hurt, and the world is certainly suffering from far bigger issues right now. You might even call this a first-world problem, although I sincerely hope you don't. God, I loathe that phrase. I realized yesterday that I was happy to have a small anxiety. I live in a world of enormous stress. I worry a lot. I sleep very little. My therapist has gifted me many relaxation exercises and tools to curb my disquietude. When they start working, I will let you know. I'm not there yet. I cannot simply move through life without worry, but I have learned that I can't control all the world's ills. I am learning to better compartmentalize. The world is a scary place right now, but wouldn't it be great if the biggest problem we all had was a lost pair of scissors?
The lost scissors were like a paper cut. It hardly merits a bandaid, but holy shit, did it irritate me. It was like a raspberry seed in my tooth. Sometimes, when we focus on the little stuff, the big stuff evaporates into the background, even if for just a few minutes. For just a small scintilla of time yesterday, I didn't think about my parents, my kids, the environment, politics, angry humans, my friends in Los Angeles, or the Middle East. I was laser-focused on a lost pair of kitchen shears.
When the new pair arrives today, they will assume their position on the knife rack above the sink. The big problems will still be there, but the paper cut will have healed. For a brief moment, my world will once again have equilibrium.
