Almost Lost

True story: A little over a week ago, I did the high ropes course with my daughter Mary. I had done it two years ago with friend/co-worker and had a lot of fun. This go-round, I was definitely weaker. My upper body muscle soreness in the days that followed bore witness to that.

Anyway, I had this one little serendipitous moment while on the course the other night. Mary and I were unclipping and clipping our carabineers from one cable to another after we had completed one element and were getting ready to start another. Suddenly I realized that my necklace was gone.

Now this necklace had been given to me over 8 years ago by one of my daughters. I have worn it nearly every day since. To say that it’s a favorite piece of jewelry would be a gross understatement. Stamped on those discs are the names of all my children.

So Mary and I are standing I-don’t-know-how-many feet above the ground and I realized my necklace was gone. I held my hand against my chest, just below my throat, right about where the pendant would have rested and tried to calm myself.

Breathe…. Breathe…. It’s okay…. it’s just a necklace….. it’s okay….. breathe…..

Then I looked down. See that kind of flat surface with cables and stuff screwed into it?

Yeah, well, my necklace was there. All neat and tidy like someone had gently placed it on the wooden “shelf”. The chain wasn’t broken. The clasp wasn’t broken it. It was just waiting for me.

I can’t explain it and I’m not even going to try to. I’m just grateful.

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I found an art challenge today called Tic-Tac-Toe. The idea is that one of the artists sets up a grid with nine art elements and over the course of a week, you create a piece using three of those elements that appear in a row.

Here’s this week’s grid:

I decided to give it a try using Green-Metallic Elements-Use Shapes.

• Green — that was the easy part.
• I had a broken chain from my necklace that I had saved to use someday in a collage. A necklace is metallic, right?
• The artist for the tree I cut out had drawn star-shaped leaves so I cut out some more star-shaped leaves covering over hers.

Thus I created a riff on the story of losing a necklace in a precarious place.

What do you think?