The Homes of Objects

I can't find the three hole punch, and that is unusual. It's one of the many thousands of objects I have in my visual memory as living inside a filing cabinet, resting on a shelf, or on the dining room table near the paper cutter. It is in none of those places, and I need it for my "Teaching Clown" chapters which are printed out, and for which I found a three ring binder, which was in precisely the place I remembered -- a box filled with three ring binders up in the Crow's Nest.

In the Crow's Nest, inside of the zippered front pocket of a suitcase, is a rhinestone applicator. There are two plastic squeaky pig toys on the bottom shelf of the cabinet in my writing room. If you want the grapefruit spoon, it's either in the slot with the regular spoons in the cutlery drawer, or with the sporks just below it. One of two 30 gallon rubbermaid containers lives under the stairs of the greenhouse. If you need a stick for your marshmallow roasting it's in the cabinet with all the collanders ("bowls with holes"). There are a few notes from Helen to me when she was eight years old in with the loose buttons inside the ceramic bowl with lid that she made when she took pottery classes. That bowl is on the upper right shelf in my writing room next to a stack of books that are resting on their backs in a jenga-like stack.

Writing about this has brought no order to my house, which is expanding with items both large and small, just like the map inside my brain which I rather pride myself on, not for the accrual of "stuff of a life," but for my ability to recall exactly where it is located. And on that map, somewhere deep in the Swamps of Lostness, is my missing three hold punch.