I’m sure there’s a lovely, poetic, and deeply spiritual reason behind Lent. But, frankly, whenever I hear the word, the first thought that comes to mind is, the other day when I was cleaning the cat box outside (spring cleaning for the cats!), I noticed that some fuzz was coming out of the little vent that connects to our dryer, and I wondered if that was a fire hazard. I mean, really, I clean the lint trap with every load—why is it coming out the other end? Should I be worried? Wait, something about giving something up? Oh. Yeah. That.

And, you know, I go to church, my husband works for a church for crying out loud, I volunteer at church, I tithe. You’d expect I should know about Lent. Oooh, look! I defy expectations! Oh, wait, that’s only good when you exceed expectations isn’t it?

I thought tonight, maybe I should investigate this Lent business. Seems like a learning experience or something. Growth, right? But then, I thought, I’d have to give something up. And that’s the main problem I have with Lent. That, and no one ever told me the point. So, I give something up. Then what? I think everyone should give up some money for Lent. We could fix Haiti and save Congo and stop human trafficking. I don’t really care that so-and-so from Wichita is giving up chocolate. Who does that help exactly? Right—so-and-so from Wichita. Maybe Lent should be something we’re always doing. Shouldn’t we always be giving something up for the betterment of others? Maybe the problem is that we only think about sacrifice roughly once a year, and even then it doesn’t seem to produce anything worthwhile.

Okay, I’ve just angered most of my friends and a whole host of strangers. Who are all probably very sincere and fabulous in their observance of Lent. Reference previous statement about “lovely, poetic, and deeply spiritual.” My hat’s off to you. You’re all better people than I am, much more self-denying and monastic in a way I can only admire from a distance. I mean that. I’m much too lazy to go about investigating Lent in a meaningful way, and secretly I’m sure that I’m threatened by people who are able to give up something they love for any length of time. I once didn’t have ice cream for forty days, and I nearly died. True story. (Well.)  So, whenever Lent is over, you can go back to chocolate or cleaning bathrooms, and you’ll have gained something lovely, poetic, and deeply spiritual, and I’ll still be in the dark, a little bewildered and feeling like there’s a boat I’m missing. But, it’s all good. I’ve got chocolate-covered gummy bears to console me.

Some of which, apparently, come in handy when trying to track down a woman who gave a bad check and a wrong phone number at a yard sale. See, I was banking on the lazy factor. It’s fairly easy to sweet talk a couple of gullible twentysomethings who are selling old Star Wars toys and music gear in front of their little gray house. It’s fairly easy to write a bad check and put a fake number at the top. But it’s much harder to fake a whole identity, to get a bank account under a false name, and so on. And her check had an address on it. So, thanks to the Internet, I found a phone number that was attached to her address in some random online Brunswick County something-or-other newsletter. There was a completely different name with the address, though, so I didn’t figure on it working, but I called anyway. A man answered, and I asked for [name omitted] and he said, much to my surprise and pleasure, that he’d be talking to her in about a half hour and would have her call me back!

Now, of course, she hasn’t called back. But the exciting part was successfully finding her! In less than ten minutes! Just dye my hair titian and tell Hannah I’ll be home before midnight.

Part of the problem with having a former Nancy obsession is that I tend to inflate the mystery in my head, becoming more focused on solving it than in the people involved, so I’m handing the whole thing over to Jesse to handle from here on out. Because he is not that upset about it and is able to deal with it with much more grace and aplomb than I would, and because he is more concerned with what’s going on with this woman than in the principle of the matter.

But, if he needs further help tracking her down—or if he runs into any secret passageways—he knows where to find me.