lost item – In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat

{Spoiler Alert: This is a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost over a decade ago and how it found its way home in 2024. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.}

This part of the lost item story is about numbers. Not numbers relating to complex math or phones or registry digits, but numbers that have to do with time and distance. So far, with the unfolding of each chapter of this Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts, we have learned bits and pieces about the lost item and how it came to wind up in the hands of the Vintage Kitchen. We learned how it arrived, who sent it and what part of history it involves. But we haven’t yet discussed the numbers, and they are quite important to the overall timeline of this intriguing item. So let’s look…

104 – that’s the age, in years, of the lost item
6,544 is the number of miles the item has traveled
7 is the number of states that the item has spent time in
3 is the number of major life-altering world events that could have completely destroyed the item and any link to its history over the past 100 years (those being the Great Depression, World War II and the Covid pandemic)
25 – that’s the number of people that are all connected to the item
29 is the number of months it took for the Vintage Kitchen to arrange to get the item to the place where it belongs

Transportation to its final destination was another set of numbers. That involved 3 cars, 1 plane, 1 bus and 1 boat. In its original cardboard mailer of medium thickness tucked inside a cloth shoulder bag, the item traveled in seat 21A on the plane and Lane 1 on the boat. This last round of Vintage Kitchen transporting from here to there required 5 different types of travel tickets, 1 Airbnb, 3 highway tolls, 2 parking garages, 1 security checkpoint and 1 wild landscape. But the most important set of numbers in this whole post are 2008 when it was lost and 2024 when it finally made its way home.

On 01-02-24, after 29 months spent in the hands of the Vintage Kitchen and 13 years spent in the care of kind-hearted Angela, the item embarked on its final journey via car, plane, bus and boat. Four days later it found the place where it belonged. It finally found its home.

Which city was the item headed to? For all you armchair detectives out there, our final destination is included in the Departure board.

Time is a weird and wonky master. It controls, records, rewards everything in our lives. Whether it’s minute with the tick, tick, ticking of seconds slowly passing by or an expansive stretch of milestones that cast long shadows over the course of a lifetime, time is always there to mark the moment. In this case of the lost item, timing, like the cliche suggests, is everything. It’s numbers on a clock, numbers on a calendar and numbers in a family. Without time, this story wouldn’t have been as meaningful. Without a significant sets of numbers all related to time and to fate, this situation from history wouldn’t have been remarkable. It’s the numbers, the time, the distance traveled that make this story of the item lost and finally found, notable.

This is your last chance to guess what the mystery item might be. Feel free to speculate in the comments section below or send us a private message with your ideas. Join us next time for Chapter 5, where we reveal the mystery item and connect all the dots that complete this story from start to finish. We cannot wait to share the ending with you. Stay tuned.

Update: Chapter 5 is now available. Continue reading here.

First glimpse of the final destination leading towards home.

It’s been two years and five months since this story began unfolding on the blog. Back then, the blog series with the impossibly long title – A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts detailed, in installments, the story of a mysterious package that was sent by a random stranger to the Vintage Kitchen in the summer of 2021.

Inside the package was a valuable 100-year-old item that had been found in a Southern city suburb by the random stranger in 2008. The item was connected to the Vintage Kitchen but did not belong to the Vintage Kitchen.

In 2021, the story had been rolling out at a nice clip. There was one blog post a month – one chapter a month – dropping hints and clues as to what the package’s contents could be and how it came to be connected to the Vintage Kitchen. In addition to the hints, Chapter One, Chapter Two, and Chapter Three also included historical information surrounding the lost item’s importance.

Chapter 4 was next on the horizon with details of how the lost item would be transported to its final destination. Then the lingering pandemic stalled the publication of that post. Our move to New England prolonged it even further. But now the timing has lined back up again and we are back on track to finish this story and reveal the contents of the package in Chapters 4 & 5 coming to the blog this month. These last two chapters will officially wrap up the whole remarkable story of how a lost 100-year-old item finally found its way home after traveling through 13 years, four states and one century.

I realize that if you are a new reader to the blog this information is absolutely confusing. And perhaps, if you are a regular reader you might need a recap to remember what exactly this story was all about in the first place. Two and half years is a long time to keep a good mystery going so I’m including links to the first three blog posts below so that everyone can catch up before we continue on to Chapter 4, which I promise is coming in a few days (not years).

So here we are… links to each. Click on the photos or the highlighted chapter title links below and they will take you to the original posts laid out chapter by chapter.

Chapter One, titled It Arrives highlights the arrival of the mystery package and introduces some key information about the contents of the package.

Chapter Two, Meet Angela introduces the random stranger who sent the package to the Vintage Kitchen. It also highlights her research journey of how she wound up connecting the item to the Vintage Kitchen.

Chapter Three, The Time Period, highlights the era that surrounds the package’s contents – the 1920s and features several hidden clues as to what the mystery item might be.

Coming up next, it’s Chapter Four – One Last Journey – where transportation of the mystery item will be discussed as the item embarks on its final adventure to the place where it belongs.

While the story continues to unfold, there is still time to take a guess as to what the mystery item might be. Feel free to post your speculations in the comments section below. I can’t wait to share the rest of the story with you, so stay tuned for Chapter Four coming soon!