How to Find Your Lost Scissors

As a quilter, I have many scissors (of course) but one pair stands out as my most cherished. Unlike the ratty “Red Handled Scissors” I detailed in my last post, these scissors are exquisite. They are a pair of impeccably sharp Gingher Dressmaker’s shears with fancy teal and yellow floral painted handles. When I have those scissors in my hand, I can do anything but when they are lost, I’m a mess. All productivity screeches to a halt. Logically, I realize the most sensible thing to do in the case of their inexplicable absence is to make a modest effort to find them, and if I can’t, just grab the next available scissors knowing that the good ones will turn up. If only it were that easy. When my good scissors are missing, I just can’t do anything until they are found. It’s like they are some kind of magic charm that ensures my project will turn out beautiful. The last time I lost them, I tore the house apart looking for them. I even checked the most unlikely places, like the refrigerator, logically because I’d once left the TV remote in the fridge while going for a snack. 

My husband has a long-standing explanation for a situation like this. He quips the lost item is temporarily in another dimension, and I simply have to wait for Other Jen to stop using it. Have you ever opened a drawer, looked for something, not found it, closed the drawer only to open it again 30 seconds later and find it? Well, that is the Other You using the object in another dimension. You simply must wait for Other You to finished using it. Other Jen did eventually finish using the good scissors and was kind enough to put them back in a not totally obvious place but one that would delight me when I did find them: under a stack of fabric, right on the cutting table. Being happily reunited with my scissors (again) always reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon from years ago where Snoopy muses something along the lines of “Tidy people will never know the joy of finding something thought irretrievably lost."

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