This is Deputy Digby Pancake. It’s Monday. We have the whole week ahead of us except for Sunday, which actually could be included in this week if we take it out of next week. But since I don’t know how to read a calendar, and I only know how to read a pancake menu, all I need to know is that I will take one of everything. Well, this makes perfect sense.
And things making perfect sense don’t happen very often in our neck of the woods. Especially when getting lost seems to make the least amount of sense. At first. Following me? You probably shouldn’t be. Because we were lost.
Sometimes, you have to wonder. How is it possible to get lost in this Florida place when you have been here so many times before? How is it possible to think that you know the way on a trail you have been down many times before and then, well, you end up off the trail? You end up outside the park. You end up panicking because you thought you were doing a short hike and didn’t bring water, and you think your dogs are going to pass out. No, we weren’t really. Just Girl Person being overdramatic.
As we looked at the trail signs on our hike yesterday, it became apparent that perhaps we had taken a wrong turn. Or many wrong turns. I didn’t recognize that tree. I didn’t recognize that lizard. I didn’t recognize that caterpillar.
Now you may think that I was afraid to be lost. I was actually only afraid that our breakfast was going to be late. But I saw Girl Person’s look of despair and the look Sheriff Brickle always has anyway, anywhere, of contempt. You see, these are the situations where you find out how much you truly love each other. We had been lost more than 15 minutes and time was running out for calmness. Could we pull our love together and get a sense of direction?
All of a sudden we heard it. Rustling in the bushes. I became afraid for a moment. Brickle stood at alert. Girl Person was frozen. I knew my maple syrup was going to have to wait. That doesn’t mean I stopped thinking about it.
But as we stood there afraid, there it was. We saw other people hiking. We saw a fence. And we realized, well, we were on the wrong side of it. Now, my solution was to go underneath the fence. Brickle’s solution was to not move.
Girl Person said that neither of these solutions were solutions. She said it was dangerous to go under barbed wire or whatever. Well, this was the first time being short came in handy for me. And then, I couldn’t even take advantage of it. Girl Person said that we were no longer lost, but that we still had to get back in. And that meant hiking along the fence until we saw an opening. And being lost, well, it was coming to an end. And that was such sweet sorrow.
You see, sometimes being lost forces us to look deep inside to see where our choices have brought us. Choices put us in the right direction or the wrong direction. And often, you don’t have any direction at all. Those are the times to embrace being lost. Because being lost will force you to go somewhere. It will force you to not remain still. And it’s only when we think we have reached the end of the road that we see how being lost can be a good thing.
But when you find out where you are in life, and it’s time to move forward with your choices, that’s not the time to stop.
It may not be as easy as you think to find that opening. But keep going, follow that fence line. Don’t give up, you are so close now. Don’t lose that sense of direction, don’t questions your instincts. Your opening might be the one you’ve been waiting for.
-Deputy Digby Pancake
