Moving Stories #4

This was not the best point in my life for me to move to a new house since my short-term memory is disintegrating. I tried to put things in obvious places and to keep things together that used to be together. The flashlights and candles in the same cupboard. Batteries in the utility drawer. Measuring cups with the glasses. Husband in my bedroom with the bed (oops, did I say that out loud?). Even so, it’s been challenging to remember where I put things. The biggest mystery of the move is that I lost the keys to the Ranch. I kid you not. It’s not like we ever used them. We never locked that house. It defied locking. Even if the doors were locked, it was easy to pull a screen and climb in a window. We only had keys to the kitchen door anyway. I remember putting our Ranch kitchen door keys on a string, labeling them, and dropping them into a box. Idiocy, right? I should have put them in a more accessible and obvious place. I thought they were in a box labeled “Ron’s Kitchen Box,” that included Ron’s meds. It was one of those pack-last-open-first boxes. Even though we misplaced that box until midnight on moving day, we eventually found it and there were no keys in it. I finally paid to have the kitchen door at the Ranch re-keyed. I take this as symbolic. We found our key to the land at McNab and now the new owners will find their own key.