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Found!

 Back in the day I sometimes used to leave money in my coat pockets. It always seemed like I had received a gift after putting my hand in a coat or jacket I hadn't worn for a season or two and finding a dollar or two or even a twenty-dollar bill folded in the pocket. Over the past several days, twice  I experienced the same delight in finding something I had forgotten about.


Last Friday night during our Zoom dinner with our kids I mused at how much I was craving cranberries and how sad I was that they had not yet appeared at Costco.  Some people hate cranberries. Some people just eat enough cranberries to fulfill their Thanksgiving requirement. I adore cranberries. I would even love them if they weren't such a terrific color. Every year I buy as many of the two-pound bags at Costco as my house can hold and stash them away in either my freezer or the freezer in my building's basement so I can eat them for as much of the year as I can.


Friday night after we ate  I realized that we just didn't have room in the freezer for all of the challot I had baked. I packed up the challot and brought them to the basement freezer. In the freezer, I found a paper grocery bag with our apartment number marked on it (in my handwriting). Inside the bag was this.


A two-pound bag of cranberries! They were in perfect shape, plump and beautiful. I thought that perhaps I had put them away last fall. I then noticed this on the back of the package.

I have eaten nearly half of the cranberries. They make an excellent breakfast cooked with almonds and sprinkled with vitamin C powder. I hope that by the time these are done I can buy some from this year's crop. Finding the cranberries just made my week. 

The other day I was looking for some fabric in my stash. I ended up pulling out a dress that I had abandoned when it was nearly done. It was too small on me and I had installed the zipper badly. It wasn't wearable but I wasn't ready to throw the dress in the garbage so it was in that limbo that sewers call a UFO, an unfinished object.

I tried the dress on. It actually fit. It needed a proper hem and the zipper needed to be unpicked and re-installed. 


I took care of both tasks. 

The dress is made out of two batiks that came from the stash of a friend of a friend who had died. The owner of the fabric was a reporter and a serious sewer. My friend took the fabrics she wanted and let me select from the rest. 


One used to see these crude batiks everywhere in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You just don't see them anymore, or if you do it is a batik print, which is a design printed to look like batik rather than a block-printed batik.


Finding this dress was even better than finding two twenty-dollar bills in the pocket of a denim jacket.


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