Hat on Top, Coat Below
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One Glove, All Alone
December 23, 2006
Sometime after I got to the car at the end of our first day at Snowbasin last week but before I made it to our hotel room that night (I’ll be done writing about this trip soon, I promise), I lost one of my ski gloves. I didn’t discover this until the next morning, so the trail was cold. I looked everywhere in the room; not there. I checked with the hotel lost and found; not there. I looked in the parking lot; not there. I checked with Snowbasin lost and found when we went back the second day; not there. Damn, damn, damn. My purple ski glove, gone. Why didn’t I clip the pair together even though it’s hard to do when the plastic thingies are all stiff from the cold? I might have noticed both of them falling to the ground, or if I didn’t, at least the person who found them would have a pair, like when I lost my mittens at Mount Baker.
I tried to be philosophical about the loss (well, I tried after I’d wailed and cranked and otherwise acted out), remembering advice I’d read once about how our possessions aren’t really ours but only in our care for shorter or longer periods of time. I had mittens with me (the grey ones I had to buy after I lost the aforementioned and much more attractive purple and black ones) so losing the glove didn’t mean I’d have a cold hand or that I’d have to shell out for a new pair right then. But it did mean that I’d no longer have colorful ski handwear. All the gloves and mittens in stores now are black, grey, white or some combination thereof. No colors. BO-ring. But jackets do seem to be getting more colorful again (though not in a purple direction, sadly), so maybe there’s hope. And of course there’s eBay—why someone would sell their purple ski gloves or mittens I do not know, but there’s all sorts of stuff there that baffles me.
Now that I’m home, I looked up the quote I’d remembered about things just being in our care. It’s from Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (yeah, I know) by Karen Kingston; she’s quoting Stuart Wilde, who says:
“Everything you have is in the care of the God Force. If you come home and the stereo is missing, you can say, ‘Ah, they’ve come for the stereo,’ rather than getting uptight about it. It’s just gone back to the God Force. Somebody else has it now. That leaves space for another stereo to come into your life. Or it leaves space for no stereo at all. Now you’ll have the silence to meditate and think about who you are and what you want in this life.”
What I want is purple ski gloves. I guess I’ll have to meditate on that and also on why the God Force decided to split up the pair.
