Happy Endings

Oh my gosh, it's been way too long since I've been here. Instead I've been busy with Natasha of Creative Nachos and crew, writing and playing with images, paint and paper in her workshop, Oh the Stories You'll Tell.

I'm working on my photos for AMLP, too. It's been fun looking for all the crazy characters around town and trying to snap their photos - what I'm finding is that this part of the country itself is the character. I'm about half done and for a while, that was pretty much all the photography I was doing because, as you know, I lost my little Lumix camera.

I had torn the house and car up looking for it, re-walked my favorite hiking trails with eyes on the alert for a shimmer of blue, even shook down some friends, thinking it may have fallen into their hands inadvertently, but all to no avail. I had about given it up as lost forever and was thinking about buying a new one when.....

....one day, almost two weeks, a snow, a rain, and a lot of sunny days later, I was at a favorite trail close by my home. I often take a short cut from the parking lot there at the beginning of my walks with the dogs, but this time I went through the gate and what did I see but a wee little scrap of paper tucked into barbed wire on a fence post.

I snatched it up, hopeful but doubtful at the same time. It was worn and bleached by the sun and wind and a little frayed around the edges and all I could make out on it was something that might have said "found ... camera".

It had been written against something soft, maybe the wood post. I couldn't even tell if it was in pencil or pen. There were indentations that could be a phone number and a name but that was all I could see and most of that was guesswork. Tantalizingly at the very bottom fairly clearly could be made out "call me".

I tilted it this way and that hoping the evening sun would cast tiny shadows and allow me to decipher the message.

Not quite.

Of the three or four numbers I thought I could see, I tried every combination I could think of as I walked. All were either out of service, asked me to leave a message, or answered and said, 'nope, not me'. I was giving up but as I walked back to my car I had an idea... a totally BRILLIANT idea. Remembering my childhood days of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Brothers and secret codes, I found a dusty, abandoned lighter in the depths of the car console and clicked it. Bingo! I ran the flame ever so gently under the writing on the paper and as if by magic words began to appear.

And the words said:

I found a camera.

Call 471-XXXX

Camille

I called. She called back 5 minutes later. It was mine! What a wonderful day. What a kind, honest, wonderful person! We made arrangements for me to pick it up a few days later. I felt like I'd recovered a long lost friend; as indeed I had. I wanted to have a party.

Happy endings.