Way back in 1993 I moved out of a place. Due to various bad luck, I had to move out in a weekend. This was a result of bad timing in a way I resolved never to do again, but the result was that my husband and I an our sons, one of whom was a teenager, did the move really fast. (We were already packed, which helped.) Because of the need for speed we set up a staging area just beyond our parking space, which happened to be right next to the dumpster.
Now, it could have been worse, because what was in this box was, mostly, our collection of interesting rocks. There was a very strange light green rock I found back when I was in high school, its partner a dark green rock that one of my kids thought looked good with the light green rock, a round rock with a hole in the middle that looked like it had been used as some kind of weight, a marble mantel from a demolished Denver mansion (we had a friend who worked demolition–he also got us a great chandelier), which broke into two pieces (bummer) right before we put it into the box, and some sandstone rose rocks from Noble, Oklahoma, supposedly one of two places where rocks form into this shape. On top of all this to keep the rocks from rattling around too mjch was a crochet project I had been working on for years and which was almost done, as in, any day now.
It would have been a very strange box for someone to steal, not to mention kind of heavy, so probably we just left it, but we were pretty disappointed. I mean, that was quite a rock collection there. It wasn’t the whole rock collection, but it did include some of our favorite distinctive rocks, but, in the end, they were just rocks and we had to get over it. I did lament the loss of that crochet project.
So…on June 30, 2008, right after the closing, we came over to our new place to really check it out. Other than a fairly brief walk-through the morning of the closing, we had only seen it under circumstances where we couldn’t really examine things in detail (the seller had it rented out and didn’t want to disturb his tenants too much). So I’m checking out the garden, trying to figure out where the sun will be and what might already be growing, and I come upon…two slabs of marble, in the form of a broken mantel. I had no more said, “Wow, this is just like our old mantel,” when my husband found the light green rock, the dark green rock, and the rock with a hole in it.
So I’m thinking it’s really strange that we just found a bunch of rocks just like the rocks we lost fifteen years ago, and how weird are we that we spent all those years missing ROCKS, for catsake, and also how strange that we should buy a house previously owned by (or lived in by) someone who had the same taste in rocks–when my husband found the rose rocks, in a different flower bed.
This is really strange. They weren’t marked or anything, but I’m convinced these are not just a similar bunch of similar rocks, but the SAME ROCKS we left by the dumpster, by accident, in a distant neighborhood, more than a decade ago.
Now, I have always been skeptical of amazing coincidences. I have always thought there is some mundane and more obvious explanation. Like the amazing story of someone who took a picture of her baby a few months before WWII started, lost her home, became a refugee, managed to get through the war, moved to another country, took some pictures of her much older son, and when she got the film back it was a double exposure with his baby pictures, or something like that. Well duh. That could be an amazing coincidence but it seems more likely that it could also be a “thought I’d lost this film, what with the war and being a refugee and all, but apparently I just…left it in the camera for four years.”
So the obvious explanation is, we moved the box, but never unpacked it, overlooked it, and unearthed it when we packed for this move.
Except: we hadn’t moved ANYTHING over here yet. Things were packed, yes, but all sitting over at the other house.
If I find the crocheting project in the attic I’m really going to flip out.