My friend’s house has
become the sixth dimension, a place of multi-universes with no ordinary explanation
but one of consistent extraordinary explanation. You see, my friend’s house is to the universe
what the dryer is to socks: It eats things.
A few months ago, my
friend had company from out of the country.
That’s not the extraordinary part.
The company consisted of multiple people who are allergic to my friend’s
cats. That’s not the extraordinary part,
either. In my friend’s house there is a
bag full of hats and mittens, an L.L. Bean tote stuffed to its gills with
knitted outerwear, and her two cats take turns sleeping in the tote. Nope, that’s not the extraordinary part, at
least not yet.
In anticipation of the
allergic company’s visit, my friend moved the tote full of hats and mittens and
cat dander. This is the ordinary part of
the extraordinary part.
The tote bag has
disappeared.
My friend cannot remember
where she moved the tote. She only
remembers that it is a large L. L. Bean canvas bag with red handles and packed
so full that it can’t possibly fit in any small nook in her house. She has searched somewhat, and she and I have
searched somewhat together. No luck.
Late this afternoon, just
after the sun sets, we decide to find that bag no matter what it takes.
We work
systematically. The cats stayed in the
basement while my friend’s company visited for over a week. My friend is a smart and logical woman. The obvious placement of the tote would be in
the basement with the kitties since it already has cat hair in it. It just wouldn’t make sense to put it
anywhere else. We search the basement,
opening cabinets and checking shelves, even going into the catacombs of the
stone cellar where I almost step on a dead field mouse. Poor baby probably came in from the cold
weeks ago, and I almost squish what’s left of him. No tote full of hats and mittens, though.
We walk each inch of each
room on the first floor, opening and shutting cabinets and closets. We look under furniture, behind furniture,
around furniture. Nothing; no tote
anywhere full of anything. We even pull
apart her sewing pile, as if the fully-stuffed tote could be unnoticed in with
the leftover scraps of fleece and fabric.
Once we clear the first
floor of any culpability in the caper of the missing tote, we head upstairs and
start opening closets, moving items all around.
We look under beds, behind dressers, and in hope chests. The small attic under the eaves, ice cold
from the weather and lack of insulation (it’s a very old house), is our next
search area. We can’t find the tote
there, either, and end up having to rescue one of the cats after he bolts into
a corner of the storage room.
The last possible place is
an alcove running along the top floor under the roof line. We pull the few luggage items out and crawl
in. Nope. No tote bag and no mittens and no hats. It’s obvious that the bag is not inside this
house anywhere at all.
We wonder if perhaps the
tote ended up in her car or the garage or the attached shed. It’s cold and dark out, but we trudge on,
anyway. We are determined, and nothing
is going to stand in the way of locating the winter accessories. We look high and low, in front of things and
behind things, on shelves and below shelves.
My friend insists she would not have brought the bag into the garage,
and I believe her. Honestly, the only
place that bag should be is in the basement, where we started looking in the
first place.
The canvas tote bag has
simply vaporized. It has gone to the
sixth dimension ala socks being sucked into vacuous Dryer Sock Land.
I wish this story had a happily ever after ending, but it doesn’t. The canvas tote no longer exists on this plane,
the plane of four dimensions. It has
moved past the fifth dimension and gone to the sixth, a place where it exists
and doesn’t exist all at the same moment in time.
If you should see a random
L. L. Bean canvas tote bag full of knitted mittens and hats, grab it and don’t
let it go. I suspect it’s in a TARDIS
somewhere, space-trucking with Dr. Who.
This thought alone wouldn’t surprise me.
After all, Tom Baker’s Dr. Who wore a very long hand-knitted scarf – it would
be just the type of booty the good doctor might like.
