Bee expert judges honey

Dushanbe Tea House

      What is the word for when you talk about something and then it occurs? Coincidence? That sounds so technical. Karma? Closer. How about serendipity? That could be it.
       My brother and I were having dinner the Dushanbe Tea House in Boulder Sunday night, on what I'm thinking of our Goodbye Ma Tour of my parents' former home. The goal being to commemorate our mother's passage into the great beyond by going on great Colorado hikes, eating at restaurants she liked, and hanging out together.
      We were recounting things she used to say. 
      "You'll find it when you're not looking for it," is the first snippet my brother served up. Advice that I remember deeply resenting as a child, ripping the house apart, looking for some toy that I wanted now.
      There were a few others: "Call people up. You can't wait for them to call you because they never will." (We are people who like to talk, and, umm, let's say our friends and acquaintances are not queuing up to be on the other end of that phone line, listening to us go on and on).
      The very next morning, I logged into Facebook to check the Memories — I do that every day, as sometimes it offers up blog posts I want to share, for the benefit of all the readers who are new to the party. Monday provided a solid pair — "We're doomed, but that's no reason to get upset," a funny-yet-dire assessment of global warming from four years ago, and "Trump surges in the polls, again," a grim recognition that, vile as Donald Trump is, "the man will be president," not despite his numerous personal flaws, but because of them. It gives me a certain cold comfort in these grim days, watching through latticed fingers as our democracy is murdered, to realize I did what I could. 
     I was racing toward the bottom of the Memories list, feeling I'd already harvested enough, when there it was. A photo I'd been searching for the other day. I was writing about honey, and remembered a shot I'd taken at the Illinois State Fair in 2012. Platforms weren't quite as synched a dozen years ago, and I was down in Springfield. I popped it up on Facebook, but it somehow never found its way into my photos. 
     I'd really liked that picture — the lighting — and it bothered me that it had blown away in the data whirlwind. Now I found it, when I wasn't looking for it, labeled "Bee expert judges honey." I probably have his name in a notebook somewhere. I might find it, or, more likely, it might be gone forever. That happens to everything, eventually.