JOY ALONG THE WAY: ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE, I SUDDENLY HEARD A GREAT BIG 'OUCH'

Help! Police! FBI! ATF! Santa Claus! My old black, blistered soup kettle is missing. Robbers? Borrowers? Grinch?

How will I get through the winter without it? Winter Soup Weather was late this year or I would have missed the kettle before this, but now that the cold wind swishes out of the north, whistles at a storm sash, and the old bones of the house creak in the night, it is high time for that black friend to take its familiar place on the simmering burner.

I have looked everywhere imaginable for it middle living area, basement, even the loft aka attic, though how it could get up there I can't imagine. Was I gluing something together up there in the "craft" corner and needed a weighty object to press it down?

It seemed more reasonable to search the basement. Sometimes, although rarely, I take out-of-season things down there to rest on the shelves. So, although the heavy iron kettle is never entirely out of season, I searched down there through the 1,001 things.

I found so many forgotten things that could now be used again, I don't rue the time spent looking for it. There was the box of half-used candles. Does anyone ever use a candle until the very last of the wick is gone and the flame sputters out? There were what I call "regular" candles, red, green, white, pink. All burned down by about half or three fourths. There were snowball and snow men candles, with interesting, rough, fake frosty surfaces, a little less white now than at first. Small Santa candles were burned down below the white fur on his coat. There was only one that had never been lit. It was an open Bible candle with the wick sticking up through some gold printed sentences of Luke 2. I suppose I could never bring myself to set fire to the Bible. I'll be charitable; the maker of that candle may have meant the light from it to illuminate the words.

I found some long lost cookie cutters, a fluted tin pie pan, 10 plastic and tin cookie and fruit cake containers. But this isn't about all those old things. This is a plea to the secular searchers to help my find my old kettle. Maybe Santa isn't secular.

Perhaps the kettle is lurking way back in the dark corner of the area under the sink, behind old, little-used skillets, canning utensils, kraut cutters and other stuff declared dispensable. I can't reach back there any more. I'll have to get the garden rake!

I wonder if, in some past moment of family love and philantrophy, I gave that kettle to some niece. No! That kettle had reached the stature of being mentioned in a Last Will and Testimony.

In the meantime I'll make do with the shiny Revere kettle with feisty copper bottom. Maybe a butcher, being in the season of Good Will Toward Men mood will split a piece of beef shank bone for me, right down through the middle of the bone so that the marrow can ooze out into the simmering soup. I have all the other ingredients at hand, including a Christmas bowl to hold a helping, another candle to burn, a red table cloth and a pent up appetite from so many hours of non-productive kettle hunting. I even have an old Christmas with to include in my table prayer: "May you not be missing anything at Christmas, and mingle with the shepherds in the pastures, hear the angels sing, hurry with the shepherds to the manger and experience the full import, once again, of what happened there."

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.