Friday's Favorites: A Tale of Two Clocks

Back in the 1970s, my husband's stepmother brought me a clock kit and asked if I had the time to embroider it for her. Being a stay at home mom, I gladly accepted the challenge and spent the next several months working on it. I hated passing it on to her after all that work, but was very proud of myself because (a) I had embroidered only a few things previous to this project and hadn't been at all sure that I was up to the task, and (b) I'm notorious for starting projects and never finishing them.

Also, back in the late 70's, I started a new job, the first since my daughter was born. It had been a while since I'd had my 'own' money, and made a vow to myself that I would buy a cuckoo clock out of one of my first paychecks. My grandparents had had one in their apartment when I was a young girl (that later was sold at a yard sale), and I had always wanted one. Serendipitously (seriously, I'm not kidding), a cuckoo clock salesman came by our office one day (what are the chances of that happening!), and I picked one out of a catalogue, ordered it, and waited excitedly for it's arrival. When I finally got it home and on the wall, I was like that little girl again, spinning the hands around and around until the little cuckoo came out on the hour and half hour.

The cuckoo clock adorned our wall for about a decade, until we had a litter of kittens that became fascinated with the weights ... and pulled the whole thing off the wall. It required a trip to the clock repair shop to get the weights untangled (do you know how hard it is to find a cuckoo clock repairman?), but it was just never the same again. On our next move, to a house with a shortage of display walls, the clock remained in the box. I was determined, though, to get it repaired and up after the grandkids were born, because I wanted it to be one of those things that they would remember from their childhood, and that I would pass on to one of them. Which would beg the question ... which kid?

As it turned out, it was a moot point ... the box with the cuckoo clock disappeared with our last move in 2005. Despite the fact that I had looked in every box and nook and cranny, the clock was nowhere to be found. I had all but given up, and figured it had gone the way of the box of purses that had also disappeared in the move - that mysterious black hole of all things lost.

Now comes the cool part of the tale of two clocks. This last January, my husband's stepmother gave me the embroidered clock! Finally, a clock to pass on to one of the grandkids, made all the more special because I had made it with my own two hands. Let's get it up on the wall before they're grown and could care less about mawmaw's clock!

A few weeks after I received the embroidered clock, I found the box of purses in my office closet ... it had been there all along (three years!), and I had somehow managed to miss it.

It was only a week or two later and ... you guessed it ... the box with the cuckoo clock appeared. Out of nowhere. In a spot where we had looked a million times before. In a spot where I had told my husband that it surely had to be, in that box, and he swore that he had looked there.

So now I have TWO HEIRLOOM CLOCKS, and TWO GRANDSONS! You tell me, is that serendipitous?

And now I have to find a cuckoo clock repairman, and figure out which clock to put on which wall.