When they came home from their Stockholm trip last summer, Olof and Tage brought presents for those of us who had stayed home.  For Lydia, they’d chosen a little pair of butterfly earrings, and I winced inwardly when I saw them, thinking that they weren’t her style at all.  In the way of siblings the world over, she sometimes isn’t very nice to Tage, and I was afraid that she would be less than gracious when she saw her gift.

To my surprise, she loved the earrings, and has worn them nearly every day for months.  She’s so attached to them that when she discovered she’d accidentally left them in a locker at the swimming pool a couple of weeks ago, she ran straight back–in the cold and dark–to retrieve them, not wanting to take any chances by waiting until the next day.

She was more than a little disappointed, then, when just a few days later she lost them for real.  She’d been swimming again, and mindful of her earlier forgetfulness, she tucked the earrings carefully away in a special pocket of her bag.  When she went to pull them out later, she found that there was a tiny hole in one corner of the pocket and her earrings were gone.

Since that day she has bemoaned the loss of those earrings many times, and performed any number of fruitless searches.  On Saturday, she finally gave in to the reality of the situation and bought a new pair of “everyday” earrings.

Last night she spent the night with a friend who lives in town and went on a school visit to her friend’s school today, so I couldn’t ask her to look herself when I needed something from her bag.  As I unzipped it, I decided to check out the defective pocket for myself, and I discovered that the hole in the corner didn’t open to the outside as Lydia had thought, but to the inside of the bag itself, between the canvas covering and the liner that makes up the big purse area.  Several minutes and a little home surgery later, I had the wayward butterflies in the palm of my hand.

She is going to think I’m such a freaking hero when she gets home.