Found on Road—Useful

Betty Crocker kitchen shears

A number of choices could replace the fourth word in this post’s title and still make sense. For example, missing, lost, broken, trashed, injured, and dead (if the item was a Ford). Useful seems to fit best in the case of an item (see photo) I found while on a bike ride last month, although that raises the question of why someone would leave it on the road. I mean, who doesn’t need a pair of scissors?

I find a variety of items during my daily bike rides: towels, coins, wheel covers, pens, rubber bands, mail, sunglasses, hoodies, hats, gloves, and various other articles of clothing (but fortunately no underwear so far). It makes sense. On a bike ride you see a lot of road up close, and it’s the part of the road—the shoulder—where abandoned items seeking new owners tend to collect.

The Betty Crocker kitchen shears aren’t expensive. Depending on who pays for the shipping, they are for sale on the Internet for between $5 and $10. At that price they are a good value, and they are useful. One retailer described them as having “stainless steel blades and soft grip handles plus a handy nut & shellfish cracker that doubles as a bottle opener & gripper.” When I found them, the shears had only seen light use as they were still sharp and cut as cleanly as any scissors I own.

Returning to the question of why the kitchen shears were left on the road just leads to guesswork. I found them at the edge of the road in the big parking lot at the former fire station on Rocky Point Road. The same building has a community hall that occasionally hosts rummage sales and craft shows. That could explain why their owner brought them along in the first place. Carelessness, perhaps, takes things the rest of the way.

On today’s bike ride, I found three coins totaling $.16, which won’t even cover the sales tax in Washington on a $2 item. Maybe not, but to me the serendipity of finding any coin includes the benefit of making a favored wish, although you shouldn’t overstress its power by being too specific or revealing the content. So perhaps today’s coins also qualify for the label “found on road—useful.”