The day after Christmas, Seattle and the surrounding areas were hit with a large enough amount of snow that we avoided going very far from the house (the city is famous for not being great at dealing with any snow fall though it has gotten better over the years). As is tradition in our household, we got bundled up, got out the shovel and built up a snow slide off of our back yard deck to sled down. We spent the afternoon (and a few afternoons after) enjoying the snow, and the hot chocolates that would usually follow.
A few days later, not having driven my car since before Christmas and the snow still keeping us close to home, I realized I was missing my keys. Usually I hang them up when I’m done with them or accidentally leave them in a pocket somewhere, but they were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t an immediate problem because, as I said, we still weren’t leaving the house much and even when we were it wasn’t in my Mini.
I had my suspicions that they were either on the sidewalk in front of our house, having fallen out of my pocket while I was shoveling the sidewalk when the snow first fell, or in a random donate box somewhere that they fell into at some point, never to be seen again.
I looked and looked but couldn’t find them and was starting to worry that a random stranger would find them in front of our house and take some advantage of the fact that both a car key and house key were available. Not a great feeling knowing that someone might be able to just walk into your home unannounced.
Several days passed and the weather started to warm up and the snow out front to melt enough to where I could look around. Unfortunately, still no luck.
Then while in my way back from an early morning errand, I had an epiphany. I remember thinking that my snow pants pockets were rather shallow and that first day of snow we did a lot of sledding, which included rolling of the sled both intentionally and unintentionally. Based on that, when I got home, it took a look in our back yard near the base of our snow slide, and lo and behold, my keys were just barely poking out of the partially melted snow! I couldn’t believe it! All that anxiety that I had been feeling immediately lifted and I was far more excited about the discovery than I should have been.
That is how I started my new year! 😂