Not so long ago, I identified a terrible stench building slowly in the kitchen. I may not be the most tidy housekeeper in the world, but I keep things clean, so an unidentified smell in the kitchen was weird. Was it a dead mouse?

I searched cupboards and closets. I wiped things down and mopped. But I never did find the source of that stench, which eventually faded away.

Weeks later, I reached into a cupboard I rarely use for a big sealable cake box to store the chocolate cake I was taking out of the oven.

When I unlatched the cake box, I found a sealed plastic bag with a salmon fillet inside. I recognized it as the frozen salmon I frequently buy to store in the freezer.

The salmon had putrified, puffing up the freezer bag it was in. The odor had escaped from the bag and from the cake box, which is why I smelled something foul for a while.

I don’t know how it ended up in the cake box. I have no memory of putting it there, or even looking inside the cake box for anything for at least a year.

Just before I moved away from Detroit, I lost my truck. It wasn’t in my usual space in the parking garage when I left for work in the morning, and after trudging through all six floors of the parking garage, it wasn’t anywhere.

Later, I learned I’d left it parked at the corner store after stopping on the way home from work. I must have walked the three blocks home from the store instead of driving and parking my truck in the garage.

I know that’s what happened, because I found my truck. But I don’t remember it happening. I don’t remember walking home from the store. I had to, because the bread I bought was in the kitchen, and the milk I bought was in the refrigerator.

I laugh about these incidents sometimes, and other little ones like them, but I wonder too.

You have all my best wishes for the future. Things don’t always work out as badly as we think they will. Rooting for you!