Elvis Was Here

Thanks for all the good wishes! Things are improving dramatically, although I'm still letting Grant do all the heavy lifting. (I knew there was a reason I married him.)

Meanwhile, Miss B is getting ready to leave tomorrow on her school's fifth-grade trip, a three-day extravaganza involving lots of scientific observation in the wild. Their packing list is a whole page of items such as warm clothes, rubber boots, warm clothes, raincoat (you must bring a raincoat! with a hood!), warm clothes, new sneakers, old sneakers (that don't care about getting wet), small backpack, and — you guessed it — warm clothes.

Needless to say, collecting all the necessary paraphernalia involves not only considerable prodding on my part ("you should be packing, not watching TV/using the computer/looking through your books/talking to a cat") but scouring the house for things that have vanished into the ether since the last time we saw them two or three months ago — of course, by now we can't recall where we saw them — as well as scrounging for required items most of which are either hiding or in some inscrutable way inadequate. Sample dialogue:

Me: Where's your blue hoodie?

MB: Mom, I don't know.

Me: Where did you see it last?

MB: I said, I don't know.

Me: (repressing sigh) How about your red one?

MB: It's too small.

Me: Too small? We just bought it last month.

MB: Well, OK, it's not too small, but I don't like it.

Me: You can make do for a couple of days.

MB: How about my pink one?

Me: What pink one?

MB: (pulls something from the back of a drawer with a flourish worthy of David Copperfield): This one.

Me: Where did that come from?

MB: Mom, I don't know.

The high (or low) point of yesterday evening was a room-to-room, closet-to-closet search for her bathrobe. Its last verified sighting was in Rangeley. Could we have left it there? We don't think so, given the number of times we went through the cabin to make sure we had everything, but I sure couldn't find it last night. On the other hand, when I looked in the front closet to verify that her raincoat really was not only hoodless but too small (yes), I discovered one that I had never seen before (it's bright yellow: how I missed it I don't know), with a hood, that fit her perfectly, hanging on a hook.

There's only one explanation: we've been visited by Elvis.

If you see him, please tell him I'll have a raincoat and some cashmere from Rhinebeck to trade for the stuff I want back. He should be easy to spot: he'll be wearing a periwinkle-blue bathrobe monogrammed with Miss B's initials.