One of the mindfulness exercises I’ve learned is to pause a few times a day and notice something blue, red, green, yellow, and white in sequence; and taking the few seconds required to mentally note what I see. This exercise can help you become more mindful of your environment and ground you in the present moment. I live amidst a riot of color and texture inside my house, and most of the year outside as well, so the exercise is usually easy for me. Yesterday was a day full of color; oddly, a lot of red white and blue showed up in my pictures. Today was cloudy with a fresh light snow cover.

This made it difficult to search for my bifocals, which went missing sometime yesterday afternoon. I feel like I set them down somewhere precarious with a mental note to remember where; but I also recall putting them in a pocket at some point. They’re in no pockets I’ve checked so far, and nowhere else I’ve looked multiple times. After scouring the house last night and again this morning, I broke down and started looking outside, backtracking everywhere I walked in the yard yesterday: to the compost and laundry line, to the generator, to where I picked up the last hose and where I coiled and hung it, into Biko’s round pen since it was so balmy he got to spend a few hours outside yesterday. I swept the snow lightly with a broom the second time I retraced my steps. If the glasses were blue, red, green, yellow, or white they might have showed easily, but they’re not: they’re the color of snow–not white, which is an illusion of snow, but translucent. If they’re out there, they’ve disappeared, and there’s more snow coming tomorrow night. I’ll have a short window midday when some snow may have melted, and after that they’ll be buried for winter. But they’ll probably turn up inside eventually. The lid to the martini shaker rolled out this morning when I vacuumed under a cabinet where I’d already looked for it weeks ago. Now just waiting for the small kitchen tongs and the globe lights to reappear.