A Lesson Learned About the Life of Things

If given the opportunity, keys will go off and have a little adventure on their own. They will suddenly disappear from any of the usual places: the little shelf right inside the front door where you are supposed to leave the keys so you can find them again, the little table inside the front door where you leave other stuff you're always losing, any of the 4 or 5 purses you could have been using in the last day or so. You will search high and low for the keys, checking each purse and all of its pockets at least twice. Then you will hunt for the 52 spare keys the previous homeowner gave you but which--coincidentally?--have also disappeared. In the process, you will find some other cool things you had forgotten about: 2 Lindt chocolates leftover from Christmas but tasting no worse for the wear; a set of semi-humorous magnets with images of billboards on them; an entire package of green latex gloves leftover from a painting project but that could offer protection from hazardous chemicals and other nasty stuff. Finally, after enduring several minutes in the sweltering attic, and two days of worrying that someone had found your keys and would use them to enter your house at night, the keys will return (snickering to themselves in mischievous delight) to the pocket in your purse, which you checked at least twice but which you *swear* was empty just minutes before.

Ok, so maybe this doesn't happen to other people. It is possible that there are tiny invisible elves or fairies at work in my house. Which would explain why I can never find anything else I need, either.