A Mysterious Day

A few days ago, I was preparing an impromptu dinner for some friends who were in a hurry to get from here to there and didn’t have time to eat.  As I scuttled around, trying quickly to come up with a decent meal from a pantry (and fridge) almost totally bereft of food, I went to grab my sponge, which I had used just moments before…… and it was not there! It frequently is not there, but usually surfaces within a few minutes – twenty at the very most.  The guests arrived, and I still had not found it.  The dinner was eaten, the guests rushed off to their engagement, the dishes were washed (using the new sponge pictured), and still my sponge did not emerge.  Very mysterious.  It was simply gone!  And even more mysterious, it is still gone. 

My mother, like me, was a loser of things. Once on a shopping day, she purchased, among other things, a new pair of shoes.  She was quite pleased with her acquisitions, but did not tell us about them, because her shoes were a bit of an issue at our house.  She had well over a hundred pairs, and the rest of us felt that she did not need more.  (Rachael, who is so like my mother in many ways, seems to have inherited the shoe-love gene.)  Anyway, a week or so later, my Mutti began to get unpleasant whiffs of something amiss in her closet.  She let her nose direct her to the offender, and there, among the shoeboxes, was a packet of formerly frozen chicken, now bloody and stinky.  Yow!  She checked the freezer, and yes, there were her  new shoes.  My mother always liked a good joke, even if she was the victim, and confessed to the shoe purchase and her subsequent absent-mindedness.

Could something like this have happened to my sponge?  I was sure I hadn’t really left the kitchen in the time between its last use and its disappearance.  I checked the freezer, the vegetable bins, the garbage, and the food compost, but no yellow sponge peeked out of hiding.  The mystery remains!