What was lost is now found

I'm packing up my room at the moment because I'm planning to get out of our house in the next week. No, it's not a teenage rebellion thing actually; my revered parents are going overseas for an outrageously long time to have a fantastic traipse around the globe, and they are leaving me alone, like a sparrow on a rooftop. [Psalm 102:7]. Except that this sparrow intends to have a roof over her head, unlike David's legendary bird.

Packing up anything can scarcely be called 'fun' yet it can't fail to be interesting, when there's so much accumulated history to unpack first.

When you start unpacking the room, in order to sort through everything and stick it in boxes, you get a horrible, confused mess. It literally looks as though a dragon has danced around your room; the ground is covered with every conceivable item known to man, and your brain has lost every particle of organising skill you once possessed.

The difficulty is that a lot of what was stored in odd corners and strange boxes and containers was placed there covertly because you didn't know what to do with the stuff last time you had to deal with it. A room can look properly tidy, yet underneath it's pristine outer layer is hidden all manner of strange odds and ends from your childhood.
For instance, old clothes [yikes, I used to wear that!], random knick knacks that you appreciate and treasure as a child, then have to part with when you're older and wiser, and stacks of pens and old schoolwork and perfume and old socks and [horrible, broken] jewelery and stickers and toys and bizarre tapes and bits of lego and paint tubes and etc.

Strange remnants of life when you were younger. [Yeah, it's okay, I'm not going to reminisce or start to muse on the transience of life].

But two good things happened while I was sifting through the junk. As happens when you're sorting through junk you haven't seen for an age, you find things. I found an earring! A particularly special, bluey-green earring shaped like a starfish, that my respected Grandmother had bought for me. The brilliant thing was, it was the earring that perfectly matched its partner that I had kept in hopes of finding its mate. It was a happy reunion.

The other good thing was that I was looking through a box of old clothes that I'd rejected the last time I was sorting and pulled out two items of clothing. The first was an amazing, vivid, blue-and-green [see a theme running here?] splashed silk scarf. I saw a part of it submerged in the mundane colours of the other clothes, and my heart stopped [poetically, rather than literally]. I pulled it out and it was SO beautiful - why had I ever tried to get rid of it? Naturally, I instantly folded it and tied it around my head like a gypsy.

And the third good thing that happened [ha, you didn't see that coming] was that in the same box of rejected clothes I found a deep blue, flower-sprigged dress [with green leaves, note that recurring theme]! In a most attractive pattern, with a tiny ribbon-fabric bow on the front of the fitted bodice, and flaring slightly to a graceful knee length.

Sorry to any male readers for that description. I know you can't bear to read stuff like that.

Now I just need to go somewhere special in my newly paired starfish earrings, scarf and blue dress!

- thought - Mum and Dad should go away more often ;)

- Lydie