Lost things and Mother

Our occupational hazard was loosing things, big things, small things, bright things and dumb things we’d build and called machines. We amazed ourselves at our creations and puzzled ourselves at their uselessness after gratifying use. Sometimes we found things adults lost but now they belonged to us so we dug holes and hid them for treasure later but we lost those too. Mother would be furious if we lost her things. She’d say, go back to your last location and find it! But who knew our last location? The magnifying glass? Was it the grazing fields where princess birds perched on cows? Or the dumpster where we held a funeral for Missy after she spent the night out or was it on top the guava trees in uncle’s orchard? But then we also went to the well where I slipped and you pulled me up as the black ants sucked my blood, and the coffee field were our cousin was caught with a boy hiding and ‘not doing anything' she’d said. Beats me why they’d hide and not do anything. When we hide we are almost always revealing something like the sweets you stole from the shop one time, or our new underwear or your thing underneath the pants. Coz mother might be watching, she says the animals are her eyes, the birds are her ears when we run off. Then she talks to the wooden bird on the chimney to snitch on our escapades. But we know how to play hide and seek with the wild, we know how to throw treats their way trapping them so they’ll not tell on us. But you never know, we must still be careful.