This is my long-winded story about finding a long-lost item, with a brief detour about destructive rodents.

There's a used clothing store around here that I'd been to once before, twenty two years ago. Back then, I went with some friends to buy some suit jackets for the guys, so we could dress up for a Halloween party where the theme was vaguely Prohibition Era/art deco/hot chocolate. This seemed like a good place to go hunt for treasure, but I didn't even find anything that I wanted to try on, let alone buy.

So I was trying to figure out where else to hunt for treasure, but not coming up with any good candidates, when I remembered this chore that I'd been putting off for too long and decided to tackle it. A few months ago, we were terrorized by a rat who had gotten into the house and would run around at night chewing into things (door frames, boxes, soy sauce packets, oatmeal canisters, etc). Eventually, we killed it, after putting out dozens of rat traps baited with beef jerky. Anyhow, in the meantime, the rat had gotten into the closet where we keep linens and the medicine box (which we keep in that closet, since it's a bad idea to keep medicine in a medicine cabinet in a bathroom that gets steamy). The rat had chewed up a bunch of cough drops, torn up other things, and drooled menthol and herbal goo all over everything. So I'd been avoiding the closet ever since, and procrastinating the clean-up.

But arrayed with gloves and paper towels, I finally tackled it. When I finished dealing with the rat droppings and pieces of cough drop stuck to things, I found a small shoe box filled with random papers. It included the owner's manual for my bike (which I bought around 1998), recipe cards from Ziplock, and finally, the treasure. Something I'd lost and been looking for over the last couple decades --- a sewing pattern for a cloak that I'd made back twenty two years ago, the month after my trip to that same second hand clothes store!

I wore this cloak for years, through some of the best and worst times. There is even a picture in my college yearbook of me sleeping on an outdoor sculpture, wearing it. Then one day, after I'd left it on a couch somewhere, when I picked it up again, there were mysterious slashes through the fabric. In my more paranoid hours, I wondered if someone who was mad at me damaged it on purpose, like a sort of voodoo doll. I still have the cloak, and have thought about ways to repair it, but finally decided that the fabric I'd been able to afford at the time as an impoverished student (it was a synthetic sort of fuzzy material) wasn't really what I wanted to be wearing anymore.

So a couple years ago, I made a different cloak, but could not find the old pattern with a hood (neither in my stuff nor at the fabric stores) and had to go with a different pattern. And I've had some really good times with this one, including a pilgrimage. It's a nice velvet-ish material with satin-ish lining, but I still sometimes yearned for the hooded model. I hate it when I misplace things, because it reminds me that I have too much stuff and makes me feel like the past has gotten lost. But now that I found this pattern again, the universe is a slightly better ordered place, and maybe sometime I'll make a new hooded cloak for future adventures.