Hiding...In Plain Sight

It's happened to you, before. Even though I don't know when or where, but I'm fairly certain it's happened to you.

And the worst part is, it'll probably happen again.

You're looking for something, something you know you've seen recently, so recently in fact, you probably were the one who last saw it, last handled it. So, there's no one better qualified to know where the thing is. But, for the life of you, you can't remember where that particular thing is.

You look where it should be. When it's not there, you look where it might be. Then, when it's missing still, you look where it should be, then where it never is. And still, it's unfound. 

Then, the frustration kicks in.

So, I direct your attention to the above photograph and ask, what do you see? There are many things to see, actually. It's kind of like a junk drawer for us, but in cabinet form. The biggest item is an orange juicer. We inherited it from my mom when she passed, so it's decades-old, maybe even older than me.

In the back, there's a couple of vanilla beans in clear plastic tubes. There's also a bowl with a packet of something I can't quite tell. Buried under the juicer is a meat thermometer and the thing-a-magiggy pointy thing you use to test the temperature of whatever you need tested.

Do you see the tea ball?

"Of course," you say. It's the round egg-shaped thing closest to the camera. And if I told you that we looked everywhere for our tea ball, you might be asking, why? It's right there.

But, did you see the other tea ball, the one in the back, the one attached to the thing that looks like a huge safety pin.

I'm asking because neither me, my wife, and several of my kids saw the second tea ball. And because we didn't see the second tea ball, we ended up buying a new one, the egg-shaped one. It wasn't until I washed the new one and as I put it away, I spotted the assumed-lost one.

I could blame it on age, but my much-younger kids missed it, too. The rest of my family has an excuse that I don't have--I was the one who put it away. No, it's just one of those things that happens to us because we're human. We miss things that are literally right in front of our faces. It happens. It's life. And it'll happen again. Might as well enjoy the ride.