We love to play Connect 4 and have several versions (including a  “Captain’s Game” that replicates the old game played at sea).
We’ve had our travel version the longest. It is small, very portable and travels with us everywhere.
Over the years, pieces have been lost and we are getting precariously close to not having enough markers to play to the end of a game that uses “all”.
This was all going through my mind as one of the small black checker-like pieces slipped from on my hand and fell to the floor of the wooden, planked,  deck below.
Gone. Not to be found.
But nothing vanishes. Nothing is actually gone. “Lost” simply means “not yet found”.
So, the next morning, I went back to the spot. I had already searched the deck and the storage area below (thinking the piece had, literally, fallen through the cracks) “If I were the piece, where would I have gone?”
“I would have rolled off the deck.”
And there, in the beach grass below, it was, waiting to be found.