Saturday dawned bright and fair. We had a full schedule, with lots of things to do, and in a lazy it's-a-long-weekend sort of way, we had even begun to do them. And then, trouble reared its ugly head. Setting out to run some errands, Tom discovered that he had lost his keys. We looked for them
everywhere, on bookshelves, under furniture, in closets. We pulled out the couch cushions to see if they had fallen in there. We checked in the car. We even looked in the most unlikely places (the refrigerator, the oven, the washing machine). Then Tom went and checked in his office (borrowing my keys to drive and a colleague's to access the building.) No luck. Where could they be? Was it possible that he had left them in the door the last time he had used them and somebody had passed by and taken them? Surely they wouldn't do that? Was it possible that he had dropped them the previous evening when he took Shreya for a walk? Could they just possibly have evaporated?
Hours later, we still hadn't found them, and Tom went to post signs on the neighbourhood trees asking if anyone had noticed them. And then, quite suddenly Shreya found them.
Can you spot the keys in this picture?
She could not understand why Mommy and Daddy were so upset and didn't want to play with her. Eventually however, it wasn't a matter of playing anymore. She was hungry and she wanted her milk. So we went into the bedroom and settled down to nurse her. And in doing so, we bumped her crib, (which adjoins our bed) and heard a jingling sound. The keys had fallen in the small slit between the crib and the bed and had gotten wedged between the mattresses in such a way that they could not only not be seen from above, but were also invisible if one lay on the ground and looked under the bed. When we bumped the crib, they were somewhat dislodged and gracefully slid lower and got caught on the bottom of the crib's railing.
Well, all's well that ends well.
