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A favorite winter scarf, distinctively striped, belonging to a reputedly intelligent retired woman in Fjord, Wisconsin, went missing on or about January 26, 2017. To anyone but its owner the scarf had an estimated pecuniary value of zero, but the woman and her husband conducted an ultimately successful seven-day search involving extensive scrutiny of their own automobile, their home, and its attached garage; two visits to an unoccupied farmhouse several miles out of town, where the woman thought she might possibly have set the scarf down while she checked mousetraps on behalf of the homeowner, a relative vacationing out of state; two phone calls and one visit to a Ninian performance hall where the woman had, on January 26, attended a retired female schoolteacher’s presentation on the history of Little Golden Books; a February 1 phone conversation with a Chinese restaurant proprietor in Ninian to whom the woman attempted to demonstrate the meaning of the word “scarf” by making circles around her neck with her free left hand while holding a conventional land line phone to her right ear; a February 2 visit to the restaurant, where the proprietor offered a recently found scarf with stripes but which was not the striped scarf for which the woman was in fact looking; and finally (happily), a look inside the sleeve of a winter coat in her own coat closet, a coat she had worn one day, and one day only, when her everyday favorite warm winter coat had been drying on a chair in the mud room of her home after being thoroughly soaked in a sudden sleet storm when the woman had walked downtown and home again in the reputedly wonderful Village of Fjord.
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