Lost and Found

The summer before my junior year I moved to a small town about four hours from my home town and an hour from the nearest city. Despite the distance, occasionally we would have to go to the city for bigger shopping trips. It was usually for trips to Sam's club or other such stores that didn't exist in our town. On one such trip we decided to stop at Goodwill for some random reason. In walking around the store and killing time we found a frame that had somehow passed inspection by employees in the aspect that it still had a photograph in it.

It was extremely shocking to see my younger self staring back from a random frame in a store on the far side of a city we didn't live in. Of course we decided to take the picture and frame with us. When we got to the register with our picture and some other miscellaneous purchases we asked the cashier if we could get a discount on the frame. Unfortunately the cashier that was working at that time was fairly new and while they were willing to admit that it was fairly obvious I was an older version on the blond in the picture, he did not hold any authority to discount items.

He was a bit flustered and offered to retrieve the manager, but we told him that it really wasn't that big of a deal. Judging by how flustered he got it was quite possibly his first week on the job. We really weren't trying to be difficult and did work to put him at ease. After convincing him that we were not upset that he couldn't give us a reduced price we did end up buying it. My grandma and I reached out to my mom to see if she had any idea how the picture ended up there because sometimes Goodwills will transfer merchandise from one store to another if it has been sitting on the shelf for too long.

It wasn't uncommon for my mother to do something a little scatterbrained and seemed like the most logical conclusion. My mother, however, was able to send us a picture of her copy of the picture in a frame. Since getting a full family picture of the four of us was rare, we didn't even think anything of her having such an outdated picture. It did, on the other hand, raise even more questions about how a picture of my siblings and I ended up in a store in a town that we rarely went to.

Down the road it came out that my aunt, who my grandma and I were staying with had accidentally forgot to remove the picture from a box that was packed post yard sale. We had known about the garage sale and that the intent was to donate anything that didn't sell. The assumption had been that the donations had gone to a local charity because it didn't make sense to go out of the way by over an hour to turn the stuff over. My aunt had taken most of the old pictures out of any frames but somehow that one had slipped by. It was a case of pure coincidence and human error. One of the main reasons that we finally thought to ask my aunt if she knew how the picture had gotten there was because the frame was part of a décor setup that she still owned a lot of other pieces. The other frames had been updated with new pictures but since there weren't any more recent ones of my siblings and I, she had kept the old picture in place.