Dragonfly

Dragonfly
Ugh! I hate when I forget to turn off the date on the camera! Original pastel.

Where would I be if I were a hat?

My mother's winter trademark is her white fur hat that she purchased at least 30 years ago at the Chicago Marshall Field's store on State Street. The personnel at the senior living complex where she resides knows her hat, her neighbors know her hat, and most importantly, my mother with dementia knows her hat. That hat turns up her vanity. When she places it on her head she always has to check herself out in the mirror! So imagine my broken heartedness when it suddenly came up missing. She had it at my house, I took her home and placed it on the shelf in her closet and the next time I wanted to take her out it was missing. I searched everywhere for it. I looked through every drawer, tore through the closet, looked under the bed, but it never turned up. For several weeks every time I went to her apartment I searched all over again, because the dementia robbed my mom of putting things back in places that made sense, I would search the cabinet in the bathroom, the kitchen cabinets, all the drawers I had previously searched. I know from experience with misplaced hearing aids that anything "lost" is usually in some quirky hiding place known only to my mom and if you are patient and wait long enough, the missing item turns up inexplicably. Last week I did my usual search, looking in all of the places that I had previously looked. It dawned on me that I had never checked in the fridge. Imagine my horror at finding a pair of dirty (very dirty) underwear balled up in the door of the fridge. Now tell me, what is more ironic? That I found a pair of dirty drawers in the fridge or that I opened the fridge to look for a hat?