(Background: a brushed baby alpaca triangle shawl gifted to me by Laura in Alameda that I like to wrap around me when it gets cool in the evenings. Thank you, Laura.)

It was eight years ago that we got the call that woke us up on a chilly early Sunday morning, Thanksgiving week.  Long expected.  It had been eight years since my husband’s older sister had been told on her 40th birthday that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that it was metastasized.

The last time Cheryl had been well enough to run around and do errands like anybody else while we were visiting, and we then having teenage daughters, we stopped in at a little shop in some mall that sold all kinds of girly frills and hair doodads.  Where, among a few other things, I happened to buy a threesome of hairbands.

One went off to college with my girls.  One, nobody remembers just when it disappeared.  And the last, the plastic well aged by now but still holding up, in a color to go with the auburn my hair had mostly still been when I’d bought it, perfectly comfortable on my head and a remembrance of Cheryl that I wanted to keep close, I took careful care of, knowing I could never replace it.

But this summer it vanished anyway, and it bothered me more than I thought it should.  No little piece of plastic will ever make any real difference re my memories of Jessie‘s mom.  And yet.

So, go buy another one! Easier said than found. Why do so many of them try to be head tourniquets?  Part of me hung on to the instinctive response of a small child, of, But I want MY headband, not some other one.

Fast forward to two days ago.  It had been carefully wrapped and super-cushioned so as not to be broken by airport workers rifling through my luggage.  I was planning well ahead for my upcoming Stitches East trip, and there it was, safe and sound.  Next time, I’m going to wear it on my head on the plane: I found it! I found it!