shoe box travels.....something new

 ticking of a watch

Growing up we lived in an old gun club alongside a beautiful lake.  It was built like a typical lodge with eight guest rooms at one end. The cook lived at the other end of the lodge, right off the kitchen and you had to go through one room to get to the other bedroom. There was a closet in the outer room and every time I walked by it I could hear this ticking.  We all searched the closet but never found anything.   No one else could hear what heard...that tick tick ticking sound.
   

About six years later my brother gave me an Elgin watch with a second hand, for a graduation present.  I lost the watch on three different occasions but otherwise wore it every day for twenty years or so.  The first time I lost it was at the beach. My husband and I were engaged to be married and a gang of us had gone down on to the beach at night to build a camp fire and roast corn and potatoes.  We went for a walk in the dark...no moon...and when we got back to the campfire I noticed my watch was gone.  We  searched the area by campfire light and flashlights. Miraculously my brother in law found the watch in the sand quite a distance from the campfire.  Amazing.

Ten years later and in a house many hundreds of miles away from the lake house,  I lost the watch again.  I found it later in the bottom of a closet that had the same configuration as the house on the lake, where I heard that ticking sound those sixteen years before.  

The third time I lost the watch was eleven years later after we had moved to our present home.  I have never found it and although I bought a new Elgin I have never  worn it much and today it is sitting in my jewel box waiting to be lost or for a new owner.