We took some time off during Spring vacation to spend with our kids. My daughter helped me plan a trip to the beach. We were packing to get ready and I couldn’t find my favorite leggings. I had two pairs of hemp leggings with attached skirts made by a local artist in Eugene, Oregon called “Belle Weather”. I realized that I hadn’t seen them for a couple of weeks, which was unusual since I generally wore them every weekend and sometimes on Friday. I looked everywhere, in my drawers, in the laundry, and eventually in my daughter’s drawers because sometimes our clothes get mixed up.
A couple more weeks passed. I was stumped. My favorite two pairs of pants had disappeared. I don’t enjoy shopping and was not eager to go replace them.
Then it hit me: Shawheen! I was reading a book called “we’re not dead, we’re different!” In it the medium kept telling stories about how youth who die like to play pranks on their loved ones. ‘That’s just like Shawheen’ I thought to myself. ‘He may have been 30 when he died but he liked to behave like a kid’. I sent the word out in my mind:’Shawheen, if you took my pants, cute joke! Now I want them back.’
We have someone who helps me with the housework so when she arrived next, I asked her to keep an eye out for these pants, they were missing.
Another word here about our family, me, my kids, and this assistant do the laundry. We keep up. Laundry is done more than once a week so our laundry baskets never get very full.
So that day when I came home from work, there was a basket of clean laundry ready for me to fold and guess what was on the top? You guessed it! Both pairs of leggings were there!!
The next day I saw her I asked her where she found them. “In the laundry!” she said with a voice that said ‘how silly! Wasn’t that obvious?’ For me it was NOT obvious. They had been gone for weeks, not days, they hadn’t just been in the laundry. I would have found them before.
Another important detail is that this woman is my friend. I have known her for nearly 12 years and she lives near me. When my babies were young we spent a lot of time together and when I didn’t have enough breast milk for my youngest, she would nurse her sometimes. She also gave me an old remedy from her homeland to help increase milk supply and it worked. So I knew she hadn’t contributed to the lost pants.
When I told Shawheen in my head, ‘so, thanks for the pants!’ I get this image: its my son but he’s bouncing up and down like a leprechaun on St Patrick’s day. His knees bounce up high in the air on each side, while laughing and pointing at me like: ‘ha! gotcha!’
There are still days of grief, nights of tears, but these pranks make me laugh! A message from the spirit world, find humor and joy! Don’t take life too seriously!
