GIRL TALK: Drawers leave gaping holes in heart

SOMEWHERE between my mother's place and mine, I lost my drawers.
Frilly, girly and definitely my favourite, they are now most likely a little dirty and lying abandoned in a ditch until a stranger happens by, picks them up and wonders how on earth a pair of girl's drawers wound up without their owner.
This is the story of my drawers.
Five or six years ago, newly home from overseas and in possession of an oversized house with nothing inside it, I decided to restore furniture.
Just like puberty and menopause, furniture restoration is a rite of passage which all women go through at some stage in their lives, and mine was an especially bad affliction.
After picking up a few battered items at flea markets and auctions, I not only decided to restore furniture but to make a living selling it.
Needless to say this endeavour lasted only till I made my first sale, a country kitchen table which after countless hours of sanding, painting and distressing, fetched a price five dollars below what I had originally paid for it. I was as distressed as the table.
Eventually my rag-tag collection of furniture was given away. All except my drawers.
Of all the broken, abandoned bits I brought home, the drawers were my favourite. With unusual brass handles and cream paint artfully sanded back to replicate a few hundred years' use, they embodied the best of French County and I loved them.
A move into a small art deco home a few years back saw them stored at my mother's place, in the hope that one day I would again find a place for them.
Recently, I did.
A sixties weatherboard at the beach was the perfect backdrop for my drawers, and so on a sunny day that could undoubtedly have been spent doing better things, my boyfriend was recruited to help me collect the drawers. Or at least some of them.
Unfortunately in one of our less inspired moments, my boyfriend and I had loaded them on the trailer with the drawers facing the back. That they would fall out onto the road rounding a corner was a thought which only seemed obvious when we stared at the two empty holes in the now incomplete set of drawers. The sound of my heart breaking could be heard for miles. The blue mood quickly turned to black as the battered drawers I had picked up for $20 suddenly seemed the most valuable thing I had ever owned and lost.
Retracing our steps revealed nothing and eventually in desperation I paid $25 to place an advertisement in the lost and found section of the paper.
Once again I was indebted to my recycled furniture to the tune of five dollars beyond what I'd paid for it.
I'd like to say the ad proved fruitful and some old cobber out walking his dogs one evening happened upon my drawers and then just as unlikely, he also happened to read the paper.
But this didn't happen. Instead the drawers with their two gaping holes now sat in disgrace in the garage.
The gaping holes were a permanent reminder of my stupidity, but while I could not bear to look at them I also could not bear to be rid of them.
Eventually, sentiment won over and the drawers were brought in to occupy a small space in the spare room and another one in my heart ... the grown-ups version of a favourite teddy bear who has lost one of its button eyes, loved despite its deformity.