It caught my eye, the sign on the telephone pole. It was on the kind of lined paper that is characteristic of kindergarten through 2nd grade work books; space for a drawing on the top, just 3-4 big lines with mid-line dots below. There was the photo, a small stuffed animal carefully buckled into a seat belt. “A pink pig,” it began in careful print, ending with the words, “If you find her…”

I kept thinking about that sign over the following week, and wondering if the pig, standing up as the lost notice specified, had been found. Once I found a rubber giraffe in our parking strip and stood it on the retaining wall. Perhaps a week later the doorbell rang and my husband reported, “That was Elizabeth. She has just reclaimed Gordon.” Gordon, it turned out, was the giraffe.

Don’t give up hope I want to tell this little girl (an assumption made on the description of the missing pig’s “dress with lots of light pink flowers”). The pig is waiting for you, perhaps next to a sign that says Found: Pink Pig.

The telephone poles serve as lost and found boards during what is supposed to be the dry season. The outdoors becomes another room, filled with sights and sounds, without the muffled cloak of rain. Seattle Seafair Pow Wow at Discovery Park. Freight trains passing and the constant whistles of the Ballard Terminal Railroad as it hugs Salmon Bay. Siren traveling across miles of neighborhoods. Wind chimes. Dogs barking. Children’s voices sounding like bird squawks. Car traffic. People singing “Happy Birthday” on another block. Air horns signaling the starts for evening sailboat races. Conversations on the sidewalk.

Signs glint in the long days of sun, sometimes lasting long enough to fade. Sale Saturday only. Dog-walker. Viking Days. Open House. Construction ahead. No Parking. We deliver. Learn print-making. Movie night. Community meeting. A pink pig…

Of course I finally called the phone number written after “If you find her.”

The pig’s owner is a girl named Amira who will be six years old September. The pig’s name is pronounced puddle, but spelled Gpuddle. The G is silent. Gpuddle has been missing about two weeks. Although the loss has been very hard, according to her mother, “Amira is hanging in there.” Putting out the signs helped. The pig has been missing before, usually reappearing in an unexpected place. But this absence seems different. It is even possible that the pig went missing somewhere between here and Spokane. The signs are posted locally, “Places we usually go, and at our corner.”

Amira’s mother told me there haven’t been any other phone calls, no false sightings, but a great deal of support as Amira and her mother canvassed the neighborhood. Her mother said that Gpuddle has had a large role in their family over the last year three years as “an overly cautious pig.”

I wish I could find the little girl’s pig, but then I still believe I’ll someday find the ring that was lost in a rental house in Vermont in 1968. If the pig had stayed with Amira into adulthood I’m sure she would have become a treasured item rather than just a memory. My mother still gets teary when she shows her beloved Clownie to grandchildren, sparing them the story about the day her brother tied up Clownie and threatened to decapitate him.

When you are child so many things change all the time, but a blanket, a clown, a rabbit, a pink pig can be a constant. As children we can let our comfort items test the waters for us; they are brave in the face of new schools, new babysitters, scary noises in the night. We buckle their seat belts first.

“Please tell your daughter not to give up,” I told her mother. “Her pig knows she’s looking for her.” Perhaps I am speaking as a mother who misses her daughter, but I really believe that if Gpuddle is lost in Ballard, Amira can still get still her back. It’s why we live in Ballard.