Honesty -- yes! Honestly.

Back when pasmina scarves were beginning to be in style -- I mean the real thing, not some thin synthetic imitation -- I was in Kathmandu and purchased two, one red, one a soft aqua. I bargained for them and finally paid $40 each. Back home they were selling in posh stores for $200 and up.  This was about 12 years ago, imitations are rife, but they are not as warm or as plush. I have enjoyed those scarves greatly, they are matched only by a black alpaca scarf I purchased in Cusco, Peru which is somewhat warmer. I believe it was also $40. 

It's cold here on Cape Cod in this brief hiatus between unprecedented blizzards. I have been wearing my warm scarves and enjoying them. Wednesday I wore the aqua scarf to an event at Cape Cod College, hung it on a hanger with my coat and earmufs. I was both the organizer and the speaker at that event, my nervous tension was about as high as it gets and I basked in some very welcome compliments.  I was distracted at the end of the event, had to straighten the room, return coffee pot and other items to another building. I put on coat and earmuffs and didn't think about the scarf for three or four hours. Then I realized I didn't have it. That was Wednesday evening. I was very busy with a grathering at my house and then a class (not at the college campus) in the afternoon. The scarf floated in and out of my attention. I had had it for a good number of years, I had enjoyed it, I had other scaves, I was not sentimentally attached to it. But it's a lovely scarf, I would miss it.

Today I was on the campus. The scarf was not in a lost-and-found  but I wondered if it could possibly still be on the rack where it had been left. I went to that building -- lo and behold! There it was, hanging just where I left it. Could  the students here be exceptionally honest?  I think they are. And I think they are also unsophisticated, no one recognized that this was, indeed, a very fine scarf. After well over 25 years living in NYC, I can only think finding my scarf just where I left it, is an  exceptional indication of a combination of honesty and lack of greed as well as fashion ignorance. I am happily reunited with my aqua scarf. And I have washed ashore in an exceptional community.