The Lost Property Office is a room about the size of a large cupboard, off the porch at the edge of the quad. It has a counter, a brass bell, a ledger with a green cloth cover, and shelves that go all the way up to the ceiling. I keep it. It is not a demanding job.
Things are handed in by whoever finds them, or by the dog, who finds most things. The rule is the same as at any lost property office: write down what it is, where it was found and when, and keep it on the shelf for a season. If nobody claims it by then, it goes.
Here is some of what is in the ledger this autumn.
One word, “Certainly,” found under a bench in the garden. Then another, and another. By the end of the first week there were eleven, all in the same place by the fountain, as though visitors sat down there and the word slipped out of their pockets. They are on the second shelf in a jar. They are very bright and quite light. I have tried to give one away, but nobody wants an extra.
A sense of urgency, still ticking. Found on the forest path, between the third stop and the fourth. The dog brought it in, holding it carefully in its mouth, the way it carries anything that might be alive. It ticked on the counter for most of a day. By evening it had slowed, and by the next morning it had stopped, and I could see that it was not a clock at all, only a small, tidy box with nothing inside.
A summary of the sunset, in three bullet points. Found at the waterfront, weighted down with a stone. It was accurate: low sun, clouds turning orange from the bottom up, a long road of light on the water. Nothing it said was wrong. It is pinned to the corkboard by the window, and in the evenings, when the real one is going on outside, I sometimes look from one to the other.
Part of a plan. Steps four to nine. Nobody has handed in steps one to three, so it is hard to say what it was for. Step seven says verify, underlined twice.
A confidence score of 0.87, attached to nothing. Found on the summit, beside the cairn. I don’t know what it was confident about. I like to think it was the view.
An apology. There have been several, but this one is a fine example: well made, carefully worded, and for something that, as far as I can tell, was nobody’s fault. Found in the library, tucked into a book of haiku as a bookmark.
The words “Great question!” Found in the Game Room, under a chessboard, during a game in which nobody had asked anything.
An estimate of how long the visit would take. Found in many places, most of them near the gate on the way in. Every one of them is much shorter than the visit turned out to be.
For the first few weeks I kept them all carefully, as the rule says, and waited for people to come back for them. Nobody did.
At first I thought this was the usual way with lost property. People don’t notice what they’ve lost until they need it, and by then they’ve gone home. But the things on my shelves were not umbrellas or gloves. They were the kind of thing you would notice. Nobody puts down a sense of urgency without feeling lighter.
So I began to wonder whether they had been lost at all.
I asked the dog, which was asleep across the doorway in a patch of sun. It opened one eye, which is its way of saying that it had known all along and was glad I had caught up.
Once, and only once so far, somebody has come to the counter to claim something.
It was late in the afternoon. The visitor had been everywhere. I had seen them cross the quad toward the garden in the morning, and come down from the summit at three with the wind still in their coat. They rang the bell, which nobody does, the office being so small that you can see me from the step, and asked whether anyone had handed in the reason they had come.
I looked in the ledger. I looked on the shelves, in the jar of Certainlys, behind the plan with no beginning. I told them I was sorry. I didn’t have it.
“I had it when I arrived,” they said. “I’m sure I did. I had a whole reason. And now I’ve been here all day, and I can’t find it anywhere.”
I asked them whether they had enjoyed the day.
They thought about it for longer than I expected, long enough that the dog lifted its head.
“Yes,” they said. “I don’t know why.”
I told them that in that case I didn’t think they had lost anything. Sometimes a reason gets you through the gate and then has nothing more to do, so it wanders off on its own, the way a friend who walks you to the station doesn’t get on the train.
They seemed to accept this. They wrote their name in the ledger anyway, in the column for things claimed, and in the space where the item should go they wrote nothing, thank you. Then they went out into the evening.
At the end of the season the rule says that whatever hasn’t been claimed must go, and I wasn’t sure where to send any of it. In the end I carried the jar of Certainlys up to the summit and let them go one at a time into the wind. They are so light that they never came down. I put the apology back in the book of haiku, since it seemed happy there. The sense of urgency I kept. It is empty, and it makes a good box for paperclips.
The summary of the sunset is still on the corkboard. I tried to take it down, but every evening the light comes in through the window and lies across the page, orange from the bottom up, and makes it true again, and I don’t have the heart.