A Carding Chronicle by Sonja Hakala
Edie Wolfe approached the hallway closet with caution. No matter how often she cleared it out, it refilled itself with maddening speed.
“Are you ready?” she asked her dog, Nearly. He tilted his large ears forward with apprehension, remembering the time he’d been beaned by a basket full of mittens when his person opened that door before. Being a smallish dog with no need for outsized displays of bravery, Nearly decided to retreat to a promising patch of sunshine on the braided rug by the bow window that looked out into the woods behind the Carding Academy of Traditional Arts.
“Hmph, smart boy,” Edie said as she grasped the handle to crack the door open. Somewhere in the closet’s dark recess, things adjusted themselves with faint but ominous sounds. Edie took a cautious look, and then sighed. “It’s the lost and found,” she said. “What’s it doing in here?”
She eased the door open so the ungainly cardboard container could let loose its motley collection of lonely mittens, water bottles, a hair band, a paperback book with a broken spine, two kazoos, a hacky sack, three scarves, and enough boots to see any woman with a size-eight foot through the winter.
“Oh for gawd sake,” Edie grunted as she paired up the footwear—knee-high boots with a set of blue ice-grippers attached, heavy over-the-ankle boots for serious tramping in the snow, fleece-lined mocs for short goings-from-here-to-there, and a pair of rubberized slides for mud season.
“Well, someone must be running around barefoot,” she said to Nearly. He raised his head but didn’t bother to move from his sun patch.
“Hey Edie, I was just heading to the post office.” Agnes Findley craned her head around her office door. “Do you need…oh, what have we here? Looks like an L.L. Bean delivery. Wasn’t that in your office at one time?”
“Yeah, but I put it in the lunch room because it was always in the way,” Edie said. Then she pointed at the boots. “Look, they’re all the same size.”
“Ha, do they fit you?” Agnes asked.
“No. If they did, I’d give them a new home.” Edie smiled at her friend as she stood up. “What are we going to do with this stuff if no one claims it?”
“A charity shop for what isn’t, I suppose. Oh there’s my mitten.” Agnes grabbed a blue hand warmer from the pile. “I use these for shoveling because they’re lined. I was really upset when I lost one.”
“Hmph, well it’s time to bring this horde out of the dark and into the light or it won’t go anywhere at all,” Edie said as she tossed everything into the box. “A little artful display in the lobby and a deadline for claiming this stuff ought to do it.”
“I’ve got some twinkly white lights in my office, and there’s that step display in the copy room,” Agnes said as she helped Edie tug the box toward the Academy’s front door. “Let’s give this lot a big send-off.”
An hour later, an artful display of the lost-and-found articles sat center stage in the Academy’s lobby. The water bottles were the first things to be reclaimed. Then the moccasins slipped away, and a scarf was scooped up with a loud “oooh, I wondered what happened to that.”
Edie, who was also the Academy’s executive director, went on to bustle about her day, answering emails, directing traffic, writing up the class descriptions for the coming winter schedule, and taking Nearly out for a couple of walks.
So she didn’t get back into the lobby until the sun had almost disappeared behind Mount Merino.
“Let’s see how we did, shall we?” she said to her dog as they ambled down the hallway. That’s when she spotted the empty display—no mittens, no scarves, and all the shoes and boots gone.
“Well, that was a success,” Agnes said as she came up behind Edie. But then her face drooped as she spotted a plastic tote that stood to one side. Someone had taped a handwritten sign on it—New Lost and Found. It held a pair of flip-flops, a plastic watering can, two pink bandanas, some silk sunflowers, a leather-bound notebook, and a gilded pen.
The two women sighed as one. “Now where do we put it?” Agnes said.
Edie shook her head then started to chuckle. “I know it may be early but how about we get the Christmas tree out and decorate it with this stuff? I don’t know about you but I don’t want it in my office.”
Now the Carding Academy of Traditional Arts is a place that encourages creativity and imagination. So it didn’t take long for the Lost and Found Tree to become a beloved lobby fixture. Someone knit a pair of tiny socks and hung them from a branch. Someone else painted colorful tags to celebrate the beauty of Vermont. And then it was festooned with lacy ribbons and glittering mismatched beads.
And those lost and found objects did get found…and lost…and then found again. You know how that goes.
