Yesterday Esme lost the little silver and turquoise ring that my grandpa made for me when I was her age. Needless to say, I was furious. Every time I let her wear it I lecture her sternly about NEVER taking it off her finger. She noticed it was missing when we were riding home in the car, back from Grandma Margie's house. We had been to church, to lunch at Camille's Sidewalk Cafe, to Walgreen's, and to Grandma's house, but didn't go inside there.
The last place I knew for sure that Esme had her ring on her finger was at Camille's, while she was eating her peanut butter sandwich. Jim questioned her closely, trying to jog her memory about where she might have taken it off, and asked her, "Did you show your ring to your cousin Mariah at Grandma's house?" Esme remembered, "Yes! I did!" So after Jim made a couple of quick calls to Camille's and Walgreen's to ask them to look out for it, just in case, he and Esme went back to Grandma's house to look around in the yard and driveway for the ring.
They had been looking for about ten minutes when Camille's called our house to tell me that someone had found Esme's ring in the bathroom and turned it in to the counter. I thanked them profusely and called Jim, who was at this point thinking seriously about buying a metal detector. He had finally gotten Esme to stop standing in one place looking for her ring in the sky, and to start walking around looking on the ground. He said to her without any preamble, "When you went to the bathroom at Camille's, what did you do?" She said, "I took off my ring, put it on the side of the sink, washed my hands and dried them." "Esme, did you leave the ring on the sink?" "Yes." "Okay, it's there and we're going to go get it now." Esme, still concentrating on looking for her ring on the ground, said: "Okay." "We can go now, Esme. The ring is at Camille's." "Okay." (Still looking!) "Esme, it's not here! We know where it is now!" "OH! Okay!"
So! I guess one can never really know what is going on in Esme's brain, not even herself! All's well that ends well and the ring is back where it belongs. Whew!