Extraordinary Miracles I

“Ter’s Bracelet”

Every day is filled with ordinary ones. The sun rises, the sun sets. The cycle of nature rotates in perfect harmony with itself. Life is a gift. These things never change. Once in a while, a day of extraordinary miracles will occur.

I had one of those days last Saturday. So much happened that I can’t squeeze it into a single post, so prepare for a three-parter, beginning today with Ter’s bracelet.

She can’t even remember where it came from; she just knows that she loves it. Three years ago, it disappeared between the house and the office. Distraught, she called me at work to say that her bracelet had fallen off her wrist and she couldn’t find it in the car. That evening, we turned the house inside out in search of the silver-chased strand of faux pearl and sapphire. Costume jewelry, but a piece that she wore almost every day. We were in the cottage then, less than 1000 square feet of space, so it should have been easy to find.

It wasn’t. We retraced the steps of her morning routine, to no avail. We scoured the front lawn thinking that it had dropped onto the grass when she walked to the car. It hadn’t—or if it had, someone had picked it up and kept walking. We went through the Tiguan again, looking under seats, ripping up the floor mats, peering into crannies where it might have slipped while she was driving. We even looked in the hatch, which was absurd but that’s what you do when you lose something precious You look everywhere, even where you weren’t, in hope of a miracle. No luck.

Nine months later, we moved from the cottage to where we are now. Surely it would show up as we packed. Maybe the movers would find it. They actually found a $20 bill behind the armoire—we still can’t figure that out—but no bracelet.

It was gone. Vanished. Ter was heartbroken.

So heartbroken that for the next three years, she consistently wondered where it had gone. And every time she thought of it, a little voice told her it was nearby. No matter how often she tried to dismiss the notion, it persisted. Every single time, she would think, what happened to it? and the voice would reply, it will be back.

Impossible. Impossible.

October 18, 2014. My niece’s wedding day. I had decided to wear my tall boots with my outfit, as Ter was borrowing my bootlets for hers. Of course I couldn’t find my tall boots, because I haven’t worn them since we lived on Rockland Avenue four years ago. I only knew that they were stashed with a new pair of runners in a garbage bag in the closet I refer to as “the garage” because it’s stuffed with everything we don’t use, plus five Rubbermaid bins of Christmas frippery. Ter didn’t even remember the bag, so when I couldn’t find it on Friday and asked her if she’d seen it, she actually looked blank. “We’ll find it,” she assured me.

So, on Saturday morning, we opened up the garage and she glanced around at the stacks o’ stuff. I stood in the hall, racking my brain so hard that I started to smell bacon. Ter wasn’t doing anything notable. Frustrated, I was about to say something when she suddenly dropped down and reached beneath the little table her dad had built a gazillion years ago. Rustle, rustle, and voila! She produced the applicable sack of shoes: My tall boots, the new runners and, as an extra added bonus, the snow boots I bought in 2010 and have worn maybe twice since then! I took the dress boots out back to waterproof them (though, miracle number two, the day had dawned sunny and mild opposed to the predicted rain and wind), and dug in to pull out the wooden shoe-shaper thingies the salesman had talked me into buying with them.

The second shoe-shaper thingy had something wrapped around it. What the …? I sat on the back stairs and blurted, “Oh—my—God … Ter, you won’t believe what I just found!”

She thought I’d found a corpse or something, but because I wasn’t freaking out, she arrived curious rather than on red alert. I looked up as she came through the back door and held out the discovered object.

Her faux pearl and sapphire bracelet.

How the heck, you ask, did it wind up in my boot? Ter now remembers raking through the closet that morning. My boots hadn’t been bagged and tagged at that point, and occupied a spot on the shelf beneath the clothesrack. All we can think is that her bracelet had snagged on something and dropped, unbelievably, into the boot beneath it. Not onto the shelf or the floor, but in-to-the-boot. Mr. Spock couldn’t calculate the odds of that happening, the aim and trajectory to make such a perfect drop surely requires more technology than a Vulcan’s über-brain to calculate and yet … Ter’s little voice was right.

It was nearby and it did come back.

We stared at it lying in her palm and I took it as a sign.

The day was about to bloom with miracles.