My things are hiding from me with more and more regularity.  I have long been accustomed to searching for my keys, my phone and my to-do lists, but lately it seems that everything in my world is playing hide-and-seek with me, and I am always the seeker.

For at least a week, two halves of a broken refrigerator magnet in the form of a teddy bear lay on my kitchen island.  I didn’t throw the pieces away because the magnet was given to me by my mom and I wanted to repair it and keep it.  A few days ago I finally searched out the bottle of glue and went into the kitchen to fix the broken magnet.  When I got there, half of the magnet had disappeared.  I could find the head of the teddy bear but where was the body?

It seemed inconceivable to me that the magnet-half could have left the kitchen island. I was even more surprised when my husband found the piece in the pocket of one of his sweatshirts.  He swore that he had not put the magnet there, and I believe him.

The next day, having recovered the missing piece of magnet, I once more approached the island with the glue bottle in hand to make my repair.  Again, I was mystified to find only one piece of the broken magnet where I had left both of them. This time the body of the teddy bear lay on the island but the head was nowhere to be seen.

It is at this point in any given situation that I begin to despair.  I start questioning my sanity, the laws of physics, and the existence of gremlins.  I obsess over the lost item, no matter how insignificant it is.  Meals are not prepared, the house is not cleaned, daily showers become optional and even getting dressed in the morning becomes less and less important.  Nothing else matters except finding the lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost son or the lost piece of a teddy bear magnet.

I search everywhere, disassembling furniture and pulling out major appliances in an effort to find what is lost.  Invariably, the item turns up after I decide once and for all that it has fallen into the Bermuda Triangle never to be seen again.  In the case of the teddy bear head, I found it days later in a side pocket of one of my purses.  I did not put it there.  Why would I have?

I smell a conspiracy.  My cell phone whispered to my favorite ink pen that it should spend some time in the silverware drawer.  The pen then suggested to a table knife that it might like to hang out for a while in my make-up cabinet.  The table knife persuaded my eyeliner pencil to take a trip to my sock drawer, and my iPod got a wild hair and hid under the driver’s seat of my husband’s pick-up truck.

I refuse to be bested by these inanimate objects!  Their day is coming.  I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.  “I’ll get you, my pretties,” I murmur.  And I will too.  I will show no mercy.  I’ll use my rolling pin to pound all of them into indistinguishable masses of matter . . . just as soon as I find my rolling pin.