What began as a snowfall so light, I could count each flake coming down, has turned into a horizontal straight line wind show outside the south-facing guest room window, snowflakes on the ride of their little fluffy lives. I can almost hear a collective “Wheeeeeee!!!” as they zip on by. I admire their free spirits.

We decided not to set up at the Market yesterday. An after-midnight midnight snow squall turned into freezing rain and sleet, slicking up the roads nicely right around the time we would have had to leave. In milder weather, we can make the trip in about 40 minutes. But in the dark, with landmine patches of black ice waiting menacingly to catch our tires and send us off into some sleeping cornfield, we might have arrived about thirty minutes before closing, after being discharged from the ER. It seemed the wiser choice to spare our bones and leave them sleeping safely between warm layers of blankets and promises of next week’s Market.

Of course, I’d packed the truck at 5:30, before we made the call, and as a dark sky lightened to grey, I didn’t relish the idea of unpacking totes and glass sample jars across a slippery front deck. It was supposed to warm slightly by mid-morning, but we were miles from that at 6:45. The branches and delicate fingers of each mulberry tree were sheathed in ice and clacked softly against each other as the wind pushed them around. Behind them, a taller yellow maple swayed heavily, its topmost branches touching the blue spruce nearby in a tender arboreal act of reassurance. There there…it’s almost over.

At last week’s market, as we were packing up, I must have caught the snap closure to a cherished bracelet on something because when I pushed back the cuff of my coat sleeve reaching into my purse for a mint, my wrist was bare. My heart sank and I retraced my steps from the truck back through the mall where the indoor market is held, past the shops to the area where our booth stood. Nothing. I looked through the totes that held our different granola flavors, the blue and yellow IKEA bags that carry our supplies, the capped back of the truck, shoving aside the folding tables and the wheeled hand truck. Still nothing. Crestfallen, I climbed back into the driver’s seat and slumped my way through the trip home.

It’s a humble leather band with a riveted metal strip on which is stamped “Life is about creating yourself”. I smiled as I plucked it off the rack at a little shop on Tybee Island back in 2016, slid my debit card into the chip-reader and made it mine from that moment forward. Having pushed through to the other side of a dark, dark time in my life (another story for another post), this small bit of wrist-wisdom was now a talisman, a reminder that the path ahead was mine to shape. I peeled off the price tag, snapped the ends together (it fit my tiny wrist as if custom-made while I waited), and headed off with Patrick to buy shrimp by the pound.

I’ve lost this bracelet more than once. Over time, the snap has become looser, and when the cuffs of my shirts move up and down in the normal course of the day’s activity, it’s just enough pressure to push the two ends of the strap apart. I’ve found it up my sleeve near the elbow, at the bottom of my purse, on the floor mat of the truck, tucked down in between the driver’s seat and the console. Each time, there’s been that heart-sinking feeling of “gone forever” followed by sheer delight at our joyous reunion, and whispered promises to be more careful. I’ve chosen not to wear it certain places (festivals and other one-day events) knowing that the chance of finding it again if I lost it there would be nonexistent.

But I do keep wearing it, and sometimes lose it, and it keeps coming back. I wholeheartedly embrace the irrational and magical thinking that this tiny bit of more-than-a-piece-of-jewelry is exactly that. It’s a teacher. A muse. Some conduit between me and the lesson to which I must cling as if my very existence depends on it: Life is about our willingness to be made new more than once. To be lost and found over and over, wrapping our arms around the despair and the triumph with equal passion and pulling them close, dancing on the line between the familiar and the uncomfortable, and trusting that both will carve out even deeper places in our beings for love to take root. Isn’t that why we’re even here at all? A bracelet and I say yes.

In the dark and icy moments of an uncertain market morning, I reached into the one place I hadn’t searched—one of those reusable six-sectioned totes that you get from Kroger when you buy more then one bottle of wine, which we use to carry the mason jars of our granola samples. There, underneath Nate’s Blueberry Almond made with certified gluten-free oats, my little leather-and-stamped-metal strap of encouragement lay waiting patiently for the student to re-appear.

It’s always the last place you look.

(Editor’s note: I bought the leather-bound journal in the photo that accompanies this post at a lovely shop, Old Mr. Bailiwick’s, just off the square in Mt Vernon, Ohio. Josh and Becky specialize in plant-based remedies, tonics, adaptogens and other resources to help keep a body whole and healthy. So, of course they carry journals. I highly recommend their products and wisdom.)