The magic wand.

Your big prize has been lost.You know, the one that you cherish most because you spent an entire week deciding on which one you should choose. Most parents get roped into the souvenir prize that will somehow help etch a memory of the awesome vacation that has come and gone. Why pictures don’t do the job, I’m not sure. Peter chose a Harry Potter Wand to keep the magic going when he came home from Harry Potter World in Orlando. He carried that thing everywhere trying desperately to turn his sister into a frog, or a pile of rocks into xbox games. Somehow he managed to lose it on the worst travel day of the year...Christmas. We usually trek in the form of a triangle going from our house to both grandparents. The amount of stuff that goes in and out of the car on that day is unprecedented. He loses the wand and the search begins. This is no simple search. It requires calling all of the cousins asking if the wand got mixed up in their melee. The game of 20 questions of where he last saw it brings no wand.  We tore apart our house, our car, both grandparent's homes, bedrooms, everywhere, yet the search was fruitless. The next step was to hit the HP catalog and replace the thing, but I was reminded that it didn’t have the same magic because being a souvenir gift it was irreplaceable. Five months after the fact, I still have the wand in the back of my mind as look around the house for other things that have been added to the “need to find list”. That list includes my head, which my husband says has fallen off an rolled away years ago. Yesterday, thirty of us gathered at my parents for their 50th anniversary. Unassumingly, my nephew Walter walks in holding up a stick asking if anyone lost a wand on the grass? At the same time, a group of us chime in celebrating Peter’s wand!. Today’s miracle! We raise a glass to finding the wand while we toast my parents 50th. It had been buried under the snow for 5 months and must have fallen during the Christmas present transfer. The magic has found it’s way back into Peter’s hand and we can all be thankful for that, except for his sister who may finally be transformed into a frog after all.