Sitting at lunch I ran my thumb over the inside of my ring finger. There was nothing there. This is a good way to ruin a reasonably decent barbecue chicken lunch.

So I looked through the napkins on my plate. I looked on the floor. I looked all around my seat. I did all of this several times. I took my plate up to the magic belt that transports the dirty dishes into the kitchen in the back of the cafeteria. I searched my dining area again.

There was no ring anywhere.

So I began to retrace my steps. That meant two restrooms, my office, my desk, my car and multiple bags, backpacks and garbage cans.

But the ring was gone.

So there’s desperation and misery and nausea. And that was all before I texted The Yankee to tell her the bad news. I started searching several of these places for a second and third and fourth time. I was wondering how far I should go into thinking about diving through the garbage coming out of the cafeteria. I had looked in my napkins, but had I looked enough? Vigorous napkin use because of barbecue sauce seems a good a way to lose a ring as any. Did I look in those napkins enough?

Meanwhile, I’m in this text conversation. Looked here, looked there. Did you look there? Yes. How about in –?. Yep. I walked over to the locker room I use at the pool. That was the last place I knew I had it because I’d taken it off to swim last night. Maybe it was still on the top of that locker, but that seemed unlikely and it was not to be.

Finally, The Yankee said What about in the trunk of your car? Clothes go there after you swim. I had not looked in the trunk. And in tearing that apart I found my ring, just sitting on top of a pair of blue jeans. Waiting. Apparently it had slipped off last night when I was putting things away after my swim.

Took hours to unwind from that anxiety. But, hey, the good news is my fingers must be getting skinny. On the other hand, I’m checking my ring finger every few minutes now.

Essentially, this was my day:

So wrapped up in my mild sickness, and so bored with it, too, I volunteered to go get groceries. Anything to get out of the cough factory and sniff assembly plant that the house has become. Somewhere in between alternating bouts of cold chills and full-on flop sweats it seemed a good idea to go get the groceries.

Then, I figured, I could walk to the side of the grocery store and take a picture of the cattle in the adjacent pasture.

Of course there was another arctic blast moving in as I did this, but that’s never dissuaded anyone from doing sensible springtime things in the spring.

Everything is blooming. All of the flowers and flowering trees are trending toward gorgeous. Any moment now every other tree will achoo out their beautiful spring greenery. It’ll dip below freezing tonight. And I can’t breathe.

But I got a cart full of groceries and a photo of some grazing cattle!