Lost & Found

I had a dream about my sister the other night. She isn’t in my dreams often. Although I don’t often remember my dreams, so she could show up more than I know. The dreams I do remember in the morning are only bits and pieces. And the dreams when my sister shows up are nearly always comforting. Her presence in my sleeping hours let me know that she is never too far away.

But not this dream. I woke up anxious from this dream about my sister. She was missing. I don’t recall the details, but I do remember the frantic searching for my missing sister. It felt current. Real. She hadn’t aged a day beyond her twenty years, but I was very much as old as I am now. Everything about the dream felt so close to the surface. Like she was trapped somewhere nearby but I couldn’t figure out how to find her.

I woke up in the middle of my frantic searching. In my dream I had been screaming and panicking, but awake I was quiet and a little nauseous. My dream had been unsettling. Even though I tried to calm myself, telling myself that my dream wasn’t real, I was still off-kilter. My heart was still racing, and I couldn’t shake the panic I felt just out of sight.

I did my best to go about my morning routine. Making coffee, a little reading, and mapping out my day ahead. But I couldn’t focus or move beyond feeling anxious. I took a little longer before switching gears to work mode, trying to lift the funk. It didn’t help. So even though I was already behind, I decided to put away my laundry.

Whenever I’m antsy and chaotic, organizing something helps me reset. I clean, bake, or take on a project. Some activity that creates more chaos, but chaos with a clear roadmap of how to reorder it. It’s managing the chaos I choose that helps me reframe the other chaos happening. These projects and tasks are all sizes and time commitments, but on this particular morning I knew I only had time for something small. So, laundry would have to do.

It was quite a bit of laundry. I hadn’t done laundry for two weeks prior to the eight loads I had done over the weekend. And it was the last load from the basement, the final reordering of the chaotic project, that I decided to put away. Still feeling off and trying to work quickly because I was making myself even farther behind, I did something I always do. I temporarily hung a shirt over the edge of a fabric storage bin in my closet.

I actually don’t have that many clothes, so I don’t have a dresser. Instead, I keep socks and underwear in a fabric storage bin on the top shelf of a shoe rack in my closet. Often while hanging laundry, I’ll drape a few shirts over the front edge of this bin while I return other freshly hung items to the rail and grab a few more hangers. It’s normally smooth choreography in my laundry process.

Except on this off-kilter morning. On this day, right after my hand was too far away from the shirt to stop the momentum, the fabric storage bin tipped off the shelf, spilling nearly all its contents onto the floor at my feet. Even more frustrated now, I left everything how it was while I finished hanging and folding the rest of my laundry. Of course today, I thought.

A few minutes later I picked up the apparently super heavy shirt, placed it on a hanger, and hung it on the rail. Then with a sigh, I squatted to reorganize the bin and its contents. While scooping up all the sock balls and tossing them back into the bin I heard a quiet but unmistakable clink of metal against wood floor. For just a moment, I was frozen. Then I continued my motion of returning the sock balls to the bin. Wondering if it would be there when socks and hands were no longer obscuring my view of the place where metal met wood.

And there it was. My sister’s ring. The ring I was so sure was gone for good. One year and two days after I had noticed it was missing from my finger. At first, I didn’t touch it. I wasn’t sure if I could believe it was really right in front of me after all this time. But after I finished putting the bin back together and returned it to its shelf, I picked up her ring. It was real and exactly how I remembered it.

For one year my sister’s ring had been hiding, so close but unreachable. Nearby, but in the shadows. I had thought there was a chance that her ring had slid off my finger when I was packing for Atlanta the day I lost it. But it hadn’t been in my suitcase, and it hadn’t been in the bin when I dug through it looking. It hadn’t been in the bin when my husband searched for my ring while I was in Atlanta, and it hadn’t been there any of the times in the last year I’d minimized items from my closet.

But suddenly, here it was, no longer missing. It could certainly be coincidence, the frantic dream ending mere hours before finding my sister’s ring. I doubt that though. My sister was and is much too strong of a force to simply be gone from this world. I think she hid her ring from me a year ago, and finally decided it was time for me to find it. I think she wanted me to figure some things out without her ring on my finger, and I think we are both satisfied that I did.

For the past year, I’ve worn a different ring on my finger. One that has been an awesome daily reminder to go after my dreams. And the past year has been that kind of year for me. A year spent trying anyway and seeing what can happen, even when I’m afraid I might fail. So, even though I have my sister’s ring back I’m not ready to take off the other ring.

Now I’m wearing both rings on my finger. My sister’s ring is back in its place, the same spot it spent thirteen years before hiding from me. The other ring is stacked on top, overlapping the crown of the claddagh.  It feels right on my finger, and seems fitting. Because I can chase all the dreams I want knowing that I always have my sister’s support behind me.