The Miracle of the Fitted Sheet

To understand this miracle you have to understand a few background details:

1) Almost no one uses fitted bed sheets.  Many people sleep on convertible couches, which they fold up in the daytime, so a flat sheet is fine, and even on beds most people just tuck in the sheets every day.  The only place we have ever found to sell fitted sheets is IKEA.  Someone must use them because they sell them, but that's the only place we know.

2) It is customary for an owner of an apartment to leave personal possessions in an apartment for rent, rather than putting them in storage.  People have a very high respect for other people's stuff, and assume others' do too, so this generally works.  It is understood you may use what gets left behind, but you cannot get rid of it, only put it out on the balcony.

3) Most bed linens nowadays are garish bright patterns, and any white or solid plain colors sheets or towels are really hard to find (except IKEA).

Now, to the events:

On 15 October, we signed for the new apartment (4 rooms, walking distance to a metro two stops from S's work) and paid 1 month rent and security deposit in the same amount, plus a commission equal to one month rent split by the two real estate agents (theirs and ours).

We spent that night and the next morning struggling to get all our stuff back into suitcases, bags, etc.  That same Ford Transit (and same driver) from the  university came to collect our stuff and us from the guest house to take us to our new apartment across town.

All that night and day as we packed, S worried that we wouldn't have sheets to sleep on.  We brought our own towels, and had some kitchen stuff with us, but no sheets.  The apartment came with a large bed and a twin bed and a couch, not quite enough for our family, but something.  But what to do about sheets?

Missionaries from church met us at the guest house to load the van.  Others met us at the new apartment to help unload the van and get things set up in the apartment.  A good friend of ours from Novosibirsk and four sister missionaries spent hours washing the kitchen and the few kitchen items ("a little bit of this, a little bit of that", not Anatevka, but close), and rinsing out the sheer curtains and hanging them to dry.  A and two young men missionaries disassembled a large wardrobe to move it from one to another, then reassembled it.

While kids ran wild and all this cleaning was going on, S dug through the things left behind in cupboards and on the balconies.  She found a few well worn flat sheets and pillowcases for the twin bed.  But with the state of the kitchen, who knew how clean the linens were, and how do you wash sheets to use that night if it takes 2 days to hang sheets out to dry?

In a cupboard on a balcony, she found a set of sheets and pillowcases for the twin bed that were still in their original package, never used!  And then, at the bottom of this cupboard, still in the sealed package from IKEA, of the size to fit the large bed, a plain white fitted sheet!

Perhaps, you say, it might not seem a miracle to find knocking around an apartment a spare sheet to fit the bed in the apartment.  And yes, there were some old spare linens floating around.  But that someone who used to live exactly here, bought--and never used--a plain white fitted IKEA sheet, just exactly like the kind we would buy ourselves, was nothing short of miraculous.  Think about the chain of events that had to happen months or years before we ever set eyes on that apartment for that brand new plain white fitted sheet to be waiting for us, as if to say, Yes, this Is where you should live.

Kinda gives you goosebumps to find 'your name' on an apartment halfway round the world.