Lost In the Prairies.....Found by God

Hello all and Happy Canada Day! This is Debbie, filling in for my evil twin who has just returned to live in the same province as me. I welcome her back from the prairies into the foothills. I look forward to her being only an hours drive away instead of 6 or 7.

I was sorting out random files on my computer and randomly found this very cool reminder of how things are not always lost and can return in very strange ways. This is not a deep story and I don’t think it has any profound meaning; it is just a fun story.

On January 1, 2009 my family and I flew to Los Angeles to visit my brother and his family. They run a church called the Venice Beach Fellowship, and an outreach coffee shop called the Talking Stick – shameless plug. As they were in the process of applying for green cards and could not come to Canada at that time we, along with my sister’s family, decided to join them down there for New Years.

My daughter, who was in grade 3 at the time, packed her blue school backpack with some activity books, a notepad and pencil, four of her favourite Webkinz, some snacks and random other things that kids must take wherever they go. We arrived at the airport, paid for one of those luggage carts, piled our stuff on it and went out into the warm sunshine to our mini New Year vacation. We spent 5 great days enjoying much warmer weather than we had been having in Calgary, shopping at outlet malls and mostly just hanging out and catching up with each other.

When the time came to pack up and go my husband found a box of markers and said, ‘oh, we should repack this in that backpack.’ I agreed and we began to look for it. We asked my daughter where it was. She thought it was in her cousin’s room where she had been spending most of her time. It was not there. We searched the entire room we had been staying in and then fanned out the search to include the entire house and then the vehicles. We did not recall seeing the backpack the entire time we had been there. I called the lost and found at the airport but they did not have the it either.

After a few tears and one more futile search we agreed that it had probably been lost at the airport days earlier, and though we could still see our Webkinz friends online, they would no longer be part of the animal pack at home.

Fast forward one and a half years later to June 22, 2010, and the end of grade 4 for daughter-o-mine. She comes home after school waving a stuffed monkey at me asking, “do you remember him?” I take a look, grab the monkey and say wonderingly, “peter? Where on earth did you get him?” She waves a few more stuffed animals at me and a notepad and a pencil. “Look” she says, “it is the stuff we lost at the airport.”

“I know” I reply, still a bit stunned and confused, “but where did they come from?”

So here is what happened: We do not remember how, but the backpack was misplaced at the airport. Cayenne may have put it down or perhaps it fell off the luggage cart. However it happened to be parted from us, it was picked up by some kind person who looked through it for identification. They found a notepad and pencil set in one of the pockets with an address on it. This notepad had been a gift from one of my daughter’s classmates who was moving back to Korea over the Christmas holidays. The altruist who found the backpack had it sent to this address. When my daughter’s ex-classmate saw the bag he knew it must belong to someone he used to go to school with. A year and a half later, when two of his aunts came to Calgary for a visit, they brought the bag with them, contents intact, and dropped it off at the school office.

I spoke to the people in the office and they told me that they had deduced the backpack must belong to someone who was now in grade four. When the bag arrived in my daughter’s classroom she did not recognize the contents - 18 months is a long time in the short life of a 9 year old. After some drama, Cayenne claimed the contents of the backpack as her own. She took the Webkinz and the notepad and pencil. She generously gave the bag to a girl in her class whose backpack was broken. The 18 month old snack was thrown away and the activity books were put in recycle as they did not travel so well. That evening there was a joyful reunion among the Webkinz!

So now we have in our home 4 Webkinz who have been half way around the world - and back. What they saw and heard, they are not telling, but it makes for a great random story for a Friday blog. So have a cup of coffee, or some other beverage that’s likely traveled half around the world to get to your cup and tell a story about something that has been lost and found in a curious or unexpected way.