Okay, I’m not Nancy Drew and I didn’t actually find a lost box.  I was more of a mediator in the story of a box that our friends didn’t even know was lost.  Confused?  So was I.

A few months ago, G texted me about a woman who had messaged our Lowi & G Facebook page inquiring about a connection to a possible friend of mine.  Okay, weird. I had not seen the message yet, so she wanted to alert me and like so many things these days, she wondered if it was some kind of scam.

I immediately read the message.  This woman had recently moved and in her possession was a box that didn’t belong to her.  She was part of a military family and this box contained a lot of military memorabilia that suggested it belonged to a particular family.  Having moved and lost things over the years, she felt drawn to find the family that this box belonged to.  So, she went to Facebook to see if she could find her mystery family.  At this point I was like how does she have a box that belongs to someone else?  Has she had this box for 30 years?  What is happening and who is this woman?  And how in the world did a Facebook search lead her to Lowi & G?

It’s still crazy to me, but the only promising lead she found was a blog that I wrote.  My first thought was that we never mention last names, so I couldn’t understand how this could be true.  I wasn’t home and didn’t have access to every blog we had ever written so I asked G to confirm that I had written a blog that mentioned their last name before I engaged with this person. 

A few minutes later, G confirmed that 8 years ago, I did write a blog about this family and indeed I not only mentioned their last name, but spoke about their particular military background. 

Then I reached out to my friends to get their thoughts on the message.  They also had just moved out of their home and had put everything in storage so alarm bells began to go off for them. They asked me to message her.  

I sent our new friend a message and confirmed my connection to this family and began this weird dance of both of us trying to figure out if the other was legit.  I then asked her for photos of the box and some of the things inside so I could forward them to my friends.  She first sent a photo of a name badge and a box.  I was surely going to need more than that and told her we needed more identifiable photos.  She then sent pictures of 6 photos that were inside.  As I scanned the photos looking for evidence of my friends, I was like no, nope, don’t know these people and then…BINGO!.  There were my friends circa 1993.  I forwarded all of the photos to my friends and asked them how they wanted to move forward.  They confirmed it was their box and asked me to give the woman their email address so they could work out how she ended up with the box and where to return it.

It turns out that this woman had used the same movers to ship her belongings across the country to D.C. as my friends had used.  Our friends still had all of their belongings in storage. After many phone calls and a walk through the warehouse it was determined that their box had accidentally fallen into one of her crates which had been right next to their household items.  Possible?  Absolutely.  Sketchy?  Of course.  Reliable movers?  It remains to be seen.

Our friends are moving into their new home in a couple of weeks and they are holding their breath to see if anything and everything arrives. Will the crates be empty? Will their household items arrive or someone else’s?  They are questioning whether they might have an end table in Sacramento or a box of clothes in Miami that nobody can identify.  Time will tell and who knows, our next blog might be a call for action to help find more of their household items.  I hope not but, stay tuned.