Kittens, Mittens, Mermaid Tails: Do Any of Them Read Craigslist?

Have you lost three little kittens? Check Craigslist. (By Rick Wasser -- Loudoun County Animal Care And Co.)

Lost. The word itself seems there and then suddenly gone, abrupt yet forlorn, a sigh, an exclamation, a lament, a curse.

What we lose has long provided life its plot twists -- its glass slippers and buried treasures.

Scan the world's biggest free bulletin board, Craigslist.org, to see what is lost and found from Bethesda to Bangalore, and ponder the universal urge to impose order on our collective chaos, to restore, quite literally, our missing pieces.

There are obvious ironies, like the cellphone lost at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and untold tragedies, like the small prosthetic breast found in Dupont Circle or the expensive makeup that a bride in Boston desperately needs back to cover an unspecified scar on her upcoming wedding day.

Adopted children are looking for birth mothers, and someone in Brazil is seeking the twin believed to have been given away at birth by an unscrupulous doctor. Tara Mulleneaux expected her 38-year-old husband home in Las Vegas weeks ago after he left for a temporary job in Miami, but no one, she says, has responded to the pleas she keeps posting, and she is alone now with four children under 3.

Some losses are to be expected, like socks orphaned in the dryer and mittens vanishing on playgrounds and day planners left on the roof of the car. Of course a canoe is missing in Montana, and a surfboard in San Diego, but a scuba diving logbook in Chicago?

It seems only logical that it is San Francisco where a mermaid loses her shimmering turquoise tail at a restaurant and an artist can't find her hand-carved wooden skeleton. "Eyes on the sky!" exhorts the owner of four parakeets that chewed through a screen and took flight, and you can only wonder what role the blue one named Det. Jimbo had in this caper.

Too many "CSI" episodes make probable sarcasm read like a coded message in Miami's South Beach, where "if you respond with the exact location of the bag of black potatoes i will return it to you."

An Oct. 24 burglary in Anchorage has an indignant homeowner hoping for the return of an 8 1/2 -foot grizzly bear, presumably stuffed. Oh, and give back the two sets of caribou horns and the gold nugget necklace, too.

Outrage doesn't begin to describe the rant by a parent whose child's first pumpkin was stolen off the front porch before Halloween: "Maybe it's some nihilistic Philadelphia thing (is it a war on beauty?) You try and make the street, the neighborhood look nice, but this pathological Philly psyche will undermine you and strip away your soul and your humanity, not to mention your sense of right and wrong, until you're driving in bike lanes, throwing trash on the sidewalk, ripping off porches and stealing pumpkins."

It is quite obvious that cellphones and gadgets are being sucked by the ton into the Earth's core by some magnetic force -- has anyone seen a lonely BlackBerry in Saskatchewan, or the camera in Hong Kong filled with images of a girl with pink hair?

Which is more hopeless: keys dropped in Alaska, or in Central Park?