This morning, as I was getting ready to leave for work, I reached for my keys and discovered that they weren’t in my pocket, as they usuallly are. I felt my coat, then my pants pockets, as panic began to rise in me. I ran upstairs and checked the jeans I wore yesterday, all to no avail.

Oh no! I thought. Not again! I don’t need this, not now! I ransacked my room, upending items, throwing papers everywhere, and shaking out things I hadn’t touched in weeks, hoping against hope that I might find my keys. I ran downstairs, swallowed the panic, and forced myself to carefully look through everything on every counter and on the floor. Nothing.

I went outside, wondering if perhaps I had dropped my keys when I was unpacking my car yesterday, but they weren’t out there. I opened my trunk from inside the car, thinking maybe I had dropped my keys in there, but I hadn’t.

I searched for those keys for twenty minutes before I finally found them. I was going through my closet, systematically checking everything in there (whether I had worn it recently or not) when I found them in the pocket of my raincoat. I had put on my raincoat to unload my car yesterday, and had put the keys in its pocket; then I had hung my raincoat back up in my closet. It was only God’s grace that I looked in there – I had completely forgotten that I had put it on yesterday. The sense of relief was so overwhelming, I nearly sank to the ground and sobbed. (I didn’t, though. I had to get to work.)

This is the second time in two months that this has happened to me – although last time, I never found my keys and had to call in a locksmith to make a new key for me. This was especially traumatic, because it was the day I was moving out of Kansas City, and had just finished loading everything, and (after a hectic day) was ready to walk out the door and leave KC behind forever, and then discovered my car key, which I had in my hand only moments earlier, had mysteriously disappeared. My family and my roommate combed the apartment and the ground outside for an hour and a half before we finally admitted defeat. It was like one last stab, one parting shot KC made at me with a snicker and a nasty grin.

But this was a good reminder: I need to get multiple duplicates made of all my keys, and put them in safe places. Even though I eventually found my keys, I was nearly a half hour late for work. Next time something like this happens, I want to be able to say, “Well, I’ll look for them when I get back. Right now I’m going to use my spare set and go to work.”

Work turned out all right. My boss was understanding, and I just worked through my lunch break to make up the time.