Everything I lose, I mourn. There was a little brass art deco lion that may have been a stylized key. It jumped out of my pocket one winter night when I was about 11 and I have never found anything remotely like it since, though at intervals I resume the search. There was a cloissonne necklace with the Egyptian goddess Isis pictured with rainbow wings. When I lost that, I went back to the store where I had bought it and discovered that those who had made it had "broken the mold."
These are the things that have stayed lost. Sometimes things come back. This week I was on a cycle of return. I had a United Nations pin from my friend A. who had gotten it when Kofi Annan's wife visited her school--it was gone for a couple of years but I found it this week wedged in the sole of my shoe after I cleaned the apartment. (Actually, the pin I found may have been one A. lost when she came to visit me. But she says I earned this one and she's letting me keep it.) A couple of days later my friend G. asked if I wanted the pirate shirt back that he had borrowed for Halloween some years ago. I had been wondering where it had gone...
My life is chaotic, I know, and the things I own are so jumbled together and randomly scattered that they might as well be thrown into the ocean. But oceans have tides, and the detritus sometimes returns. And then I can go treasure-hunting.