Last post, I wrote about losing an earring and then finding it again – twice. But that wasn’t the first time I had lost an earring. About a decade ago, my husband bought me a pair of small diamond hoops for Christmas. They were my favorite earrings, and I wore them everywhere.
While I was putting them on one day, I thought I had stuck the earring through my earlobe and fastened it, but I guess I hadn’t. The earring dropped to the floor. I searched the carpet on hands and knees for it, but I couldn’t find it. But while I was on the floor, I noticed that my bathroom cabinets had a slight opening of about an inch. After completing an exhaustive search, I realized that the earring must have bounced on the carpeted floor into this crack under the cabinets.
I tried everything: shining a light in there, using my phone camera to film under the cabinet to verify it was there, having my youngest try to reach her hand through the crack to see if she could feel it (ew!). I was so sad that this diamond earring was forever entombed in the bottom of the master bathroom cabinets.
My dad was always up for a challenge, though, so when I told my mom and him about what happened, he came over with a solution: cut a hole in the bottom of the cabinet so that we could stick the nozzle for a small vacuum under the cabinet. At first, I wasn’t keen on having a hole in the bottom of the cabinet, but he convinced me that we could cut the hole at the bottom of the cabinet that was situated under the drawers. Unless someone took out the drawers, they would never know there was hole cut in the bottom of the cabinet. So he worked his magic with a small electric saw, cutting a square hole about five inches in diameter, and then I used the long nozzle hose to vacuum under the cabinet, which clearly hadn’t been cleaned since it had been installed about 15 years before. I dumped the vacuum’s dust bag on to a newspaper and felt through the dirt and hair with my fingers. In the midst of that mess was my diamond earring.
You see, we need each other to hold on to hope. I couldn’t have come up with that solution on my own; I needed my dad and mom to help me. And because they helped me hold on to hope, I still wear those beautiful diamond earrings today. And the home where we used to live probably still has a hole cut in the bottom of its master bathroom cabinets.