The Purse

Sweetie found a purse in the garbage can last night. With the exception of a few cough drops, some gum, three cigarettes one floppy disk and a few bank receipts it was empty. Of course the first thought was that the purse might have been stolen and simply discarded after it had been cleaned out. The only real clue we had to go on is the fact that there is a name in one of the word documents on the floppy disk.

Unfortunately the trail kind of ends there as there is no same name in the phone book or on line. We have an orphaned purse that right now it’s sitting on the table in the kitchen. Or we don’t…we might have an abandoned purse sitting on the table in the kitchen. There’s a small difference in those two sentences I think. As an orphaned purse, the purse holds no blame for its predicament, but as an abandoned purse, though still technically not to blame, one gets suspicious that maybe the purse did something to bring this abandonment upon itself. Perhaps it was a purse pain in the ass. Impossible you say? Well think about it for a moment…did things fall easily out of it? Were the pockets to small or to deep? It didn’t have a shoulder strap, and really, does anyone wear a purse without a shoulder strap? Perhaps the owner had just had enough of the damn thing and in a fit of pique tossed it out.

For a stolen purse, I’m all about finding the owner. For an orphaned purse, I’m all about finding it a purpose. For an abandoned purse, I have done all I’m going to do. But as of yet, it’s still sitting on the kitchen table, full of cough drops, gum and issues of abandonment.

This morning the city is once again working on the sewers outside the trailer park. They keep it all pretty quiet when you come up to them and start asking questions, but when it’s six thirty in the morning, for some reason they don’t worry about quiet all that much. There are four trucks, two large water pumps and three hundred feet of hose outside our single-wide today and in all that circus not one person was able to explain what it is there doing.

I woke up to late to make coffee this morning, but I cleaned out the change jar to scrape together enough for a cup on the way to the mill. Next to where I park my car was an old jacket and for a moment there I thought about picking it up and seeing if I could find the owner of it as well, but decided against it. An abandoned jacket, even if it’s an orphaned one, just doesn’t have the same appeal as a woman’s handbag.