Do you lose things—car keys, gloves, a shoe, important papers, and other things too numerous to mention? You know, those things you think you know exactly where they are, but they aren’t when you reach for them? As the years pass, I keep adding to my lost and found experiences.

Thirty or 40 years ago, my mother walked a few blocks from her house to browse a new household goods shop. She returned home with a set of four stainless steel measuring cups and a stand with hooks to hang them on. When Mother came to live with us, she brought the set along. It has been a fixture on my kitchen cabinet for more years than I want to count. Hardly a day goes by that I do not have need for one or the other of those measuring cups. Then sometime around last Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, the half-cup one disappeared. I decided maybe it got scooped up with some garbage and thrown away. Otherwise, it had to be hiding out of sight somewhere in the kitchen. I kept forgetting to ask family members who visited during the holidays about it. Although I had other measuring cups, I was amazed at how many times I reached for it. I just kept searching—about once a week at least.

I pulled out drawers. I pushed glasses and dishes around in my kitchen cabinets. I hunted under cabinets. I made sure it was not stuck in a corner of the dishwasher. I hated to think it had landed in the garbage and gone on to never-never-land. I had just about convinced myself that was the answer. Then one day as I poked around in my pantry for a package of dried apples to make fried apple pies, my hand fell on an almost empty artificial sweetener bag. There was something solid inside. It struck me right away. Here’s my measuring cup.

Little Girl dog probably thought I had gone crazy when I pulled out that cup and shouted, “I’ve found it! I found my measuring cup! Whoopee!” While I did a sort of little jig in the kitchen, she turned, walked out of the kitchen, and snuggled back into her bed, totally unconcerned. “Crazy human,” she probably thought (if dogs think).

Often during income tax time, I recall losing a form I needed to include with our income tax papers. Fortunately, I had started gathering everything early, but that piece of paper which was once in my hands had disappeared. In desperation, I called requesting a duplicate. Happy day. It arrived in plenty of time to take everything we needed to the accountant. Later, when I moved a filing cabinet, the object of my frustration turned up behind it.

As I have mentioned in a previous column, I found my lost reading glasses in a shoe in my closet after searching for months. That was the absolutely most ridiculous of all my lost and found experiences.