I found my reading glasses in the freezer on a Wednesday, wedged between a bag of frozen peas and a container of soup I’d made two weeks earlier and forgotten about. I was looking for the peas. I was not looking for my glasses, because I did not know my glasses were lost, because I hadn’t needed them since the night before and had assumed, the way you do, that they were wherever glasses usually end up.
I stood there holding them, cold in my hand, and laughed once, out loud, in an empty kitchen, which is a thing I do more often than I used to and don’t feel particularly strange about anymore.
Trying to Reconstruct the Crime
I tried to work out how they’d gotten there and came up mostly empty. I remembered reading the paper at the kitchen table the night before. I remembered going to the freezer at some point after that, probably for ice, or for the frozen peas I keep for the ache in my knee more than for eating. Somewhere between the table and the freezer, apparently, I had taken my glasses off and set them down inside instead of on the counter, and then closed the door on them without noticing.
I don’t have a memory of doing it. That’s the part that unsettled me a little, not because I think anything is seriously wrong with me, but because it’s strange to do something with your own hands and have absolutely no record of it in your head. Like watching a clip of yourself from a security camera.
This Isn’t the First Odd Place
I’ve found my keys in the refrigerator before, years ago, and a phone charger once tucked into a shoe I hadn’t worn in months. I think what happens is that my hands are doing one task while my mind has already moved three tasks ahead, and the two don’t always meet back up in the right place. I used to find this more embarrassing than I do now. At some point you either laugh at it or you spend a lot of energy being upset about something that costs you nothing but a few minutes of searching.
What I Told Wanda
I told Wanda about it over the fence the next day, expecting some sympathy, and instead she told me a longer story about losing her hearing aid inside a loaf of bread she’d been kneading, which she swears happened, though I have my doubts about the exact details given how many times I’ve heard variations of that story with slightly different bread involved. Still, it made me feel better. Not because it was true necessarily, but because it meant I wasn’t the only one narrating her own small failures to the neighbors.
The Glasses Themselves
They were fine, for what it’s worth. A little cold when I put them back on, cold enough that I noticed it against my face for a few seconds before they warmed up. The lenses didn’t crack or fog in any lasting way. It was the frozen peas that took the real damage, if you can call it that, since I’d apparently set the glasses down right on top of the bag and left a little dent in it that never quite worked itself back out.
Why I’m Writing About This At All
It seems like such a small thing to write down, glasses in a freezer, and maybe it is. But I think what I liked about it, once the initial confusion passed, was how completely ordinary the mistake was. Nothing dramatic happened. I didn’t lose anything important. I just did something absentminded and mildly funny, the kind of thing that happens to a person living her life and not paying close enough attention to every single motion of it.
I’ve started leaving my glasses in the same spot on purpose now, a little dish by the door, mostly because I don’t trust myself not to repeat the mistake in some new and stranger location. Dot has taken an interest in the dish, for reasons I can’t explain, and occasionally bats the glasses onto the floor just to watch them slide. Between the two of us, I’m not sure who’s more responsible for how often I have to go looking for them these days.
The System Doesn’t Always Hold
I want to admit that the dish system has already failed me twice since I set it up. Once I found the glasses on the arm of the sofa, no memory of putting them there, and once, more embarrassingly, I found them pushed up on top of my own head after nearly ten minutes of searching the house room by room, checking the same three surfaces over and over as if repetition might change what was actually there. My neighbor across the street, catching me through the window pacing around my own living room, later asked what on earth I’d lost. I didn’t have a satisfying answer for her.
I’ve stopped expecting myself to solve this completely. I think some amount of misplacing things is just going to be part of how my days go from here on, and fighting that too hard seems like more effort than it’s worth. The freezer, at least, hasn’t happened again. That feels like a reasonable, if modest, bar to hold myself to.
I did mention the whole saga to my doctor at a routine visit, half joking, half genuinely curious whether I should be concerned about it. She asked a few questions, seemed satisfied with my answers, and said this kind of thing is common enough at my age and doesn’t necessarily mean anything beyond a busy, distracted mind. I believed her, mostly, and left feeling less worried than I had going in, though I still catch myself checking the freezer out of habit now whenever I’m looking for something small and can’t immediately place where I left it.