If you saw a girl in a pink dress jumping around in the middle of the road today, wonder no more. That was me. And the black thing in my hand? That was my wallet. I was quite glad to be reunited with it again.

The fact that I was wearing a pink dress was important. Even more important was the fact that my pink dress does not have pockets. Neither does my jean jacket. So my wallet, which I usually keep in my pocket, didn’t have any pockets to go into. Naturally, that meant that after I scanned my credit card at the gas pump, I set my wallet down on my car. Then I got distracted by something shiny and/or the numbers flitting by on the gas pump’s meter and POOF. Wallet forgotten.

I didn’t figure out it was missing until 3 hours later, when I was trying to wash my car. Cousin Amy and her husband are coming into town this weekend to hang out, and they always have very, very clean cars. I feel peer pressure when I’m around them to also have a clean car. I was sitting at the car wash digging through my purse when I realized my dumb wallet wasn’t there. I fretted.

I called my friend to see if I’d left it at her house this afternoon. I went to her place after I got gas. She didn’t find it. So I called the gas station to see if someone had found it. No, he said. No one had turned it in. Then I went and grabbed friend-turned-neighbor Josh and had him search my car, in case I was just not seeing something, or not checking some obvious place. He didn’t find it either.

So then Josh, MP, Juliana (Josh and MP’s 6-year old) and I all piled into the car and we drove back to the gas station (a 30 minute trip) where I had last had the wallet. We pulled into the same pump, and it was nowhere to be found. Josh asked, “Where did you go after this?” I said, “To Josie’s house. I didn’t even go inside the gas station!”

We both turned our gaze to the street, and that’s when I noticed the black lump in the middle of the road. It looked like it could have been a blob of tar that had been formerly employed as a yellow reflector keeper-downer. I said, “WAIT A MINUTE! IS THAT?…. THAT’S IT!!!”

I have never, ever, not once in my life, wished more that I was a free runner. Absolutely nothing could have displayed my excitement more than turning a series of badass kick-flips and possibly bouncing (in a suave and awesome way) off the hood of a car or two. Alas, I am not a free runner. Instead, I just had to settle for bouncing up and down, and excitedly pointing to my wallet as each car that drove by, hoping that my smile + my bouncing + my wallet in my hand would effectively convey the above story to each of the car’s drivers as they passed.