Every so often a friend looks on a website that lists people who have unclaimed bank accounts. They alert me that an undisclosed amount is waiting if I take the trouble to go after it. It is not just me. The list often includes friends and cousins, and the excitement builds about how big the windfall might be for each of us. Sometimes it's significant. 

 

My son is encouraging me to learn how to add pictures to the screen saver he set up for me last year. The one I gaze at every day. The one that makes me happy. He wants me to understand the process which is admittedly only a handful of steps. Download. Save. Copy. Share. Boom. I pulled it off successfully this week and in less than a minute the photos showed up on my big screen. I wondered about where and how they traveled. Through a cloud? On a web? Across invisible bandwidths? Was it thousands of miles? Did they bounce off a satellite in orbit? How fast were they going? What birds or stars did they pass along the way? Did they wave?

 

In any case they landed in my living room without so much as a thud, and the recollections of thousands of moments feed me such that I forget to eat breakfast. Who needs toast when you can have joy?

 

Like the day we concocted the plan to dress the twins up like Raggedy Ann and Andy, and in a matter of hours I had sewn costumes, run to the store for socks, and tied yarn into hair. My daughter thought to take the photo shoot at the local barn, and fourteen years later I still have them to love. The girls and the pictures.

 

All of us have an immense storehouse of good feelings. But we forget to download them. Each time John and I ask couples to brag about one another I see them make the effort to pull up the appreciation that waits on the other side of a few mind clicks. The account is there. Too often unclaimed. 

 

And sometimes it's significant.