Has anyone found the lid to this woman’s cooler? No, really.

Debra Kelley of Bluffton received the strangest phone call Wednesday.

That phone call was from me.

I contacted her because I had stumbled upon her post in the Craigslist lost and found.

A month ago, her husband, Jack, had lost something important to them both while out on the water near the bridges to Hilton Head Island, and Kelley was hoping someone out there might have seen it and picked it up.

I did not find their lost item, mind you.

But I really wanted to know more about it.

How could I not?

“So ... tell me about this ‘red lid to a 5-gallon Igloo cooler.’ ”

A cooler lid!

Somebody had put in a lost and found ad for a cooler lid!

Kelley’s listing was for something so mundane, so unimportant-seeming, so disposable that I had to assume this was a super-special cooler — maybe it had flown with an astronaut to space and back, maybe Mike Tyson had used it to quench his thirst in between rounds, maybe it turned water into wine.

Nope.

“It was a good cooler,” Kelley said between occasionally laughing at me for even asking. “We used it in the boat for sodas and water. It was just convenient and a good size. I have other coolers, but this fit in the boat nicely.”

Interesting.

So, my mother has this mug that she uses.

She has had this mug for more than 30 years. She drinks her tea out of it.

The mug is chipped and says “Queensland, Australia” on it.

My mother has never been to Queensland, Australia.

On this mug are small cartoon figures of beachgoers in various states of enjoying life, and if you look closely, you will find that one of the beachgoers forgot his bathing suit.

He is — and I thank him for this — facing away from us.

I have hated this mug since the day she bought it, which was at a pre-Dollar Store dollar store on the drive home from Nantasket Beach in Massachusetts.

I remember everything about that day and that store. The flickering lights. The feel of the ropes tying me to a folding chair. The black hood that was put on me. The dripping water. The sound of power tools near my head.

OK, I might be slightly exaggerating the torture. But the store was dusty, musty and aggressively NOT Carvel’s ice cream shop, where normal families go after a day in the sun.

This 5-cent mug (I’m adjusting for inflation) is still a working mug.

And this is why she keeps it. This is why she still uses it. Because why would anyone throw out something that’s still usable?

In the household of my youth, socks got darned. Buttons were sewed back on. Old green-and-white plastic containers from gallons of Newport Creamery ice cream got filled with leftover stew and put in the freezer.

Paper towels were used sparingly and then only perforation by perforation instead of in thickly wrapped paper towel mitts so that skin never touches whatever is getting wiped up. (I mean, what kind of animal does that? Definitely not, um, me.)

And old T-shirts got turned into something called “a rag” that was then used for dusting and polishing until it became a single thread.

As I have always contended, I think I might have been adopted. Or else I am rebelling in the dumbest way possible.

Because I am the worst of the worst.

I noticed a tiny dent on my car door the other day, and I was halfway to the dealership to get a new car before a tiny voice in my head was able to talk some sense into me.

I am wasteful. I am green in spirit but whatever the opposite of green is in practice. I am shallow and selfish, and I once threw out perfectly good measuring cups because they looked too “1990s Crate and Barrel.”

This is why the cooler lid fascinated me so much.

Kelley bought the cooler a full 20 years ago for a work party.

It was $30 back then.

A replacement would cost about that now, which is sad for the cooler industry but nice for the rest of us.

Cans and bottles stayed chilled in Kelley’s cooler. The spigot still worked well.

Best of all, the lid was flat, which meant the cooler could double as an extra seat at a picnic or a resting spot on the boat. The newfangled version of this cooler has a rounded lid from a built-in handle. No one wants to sit on that.

“We took care of (this cooler); we maintained it,” Kelley said. “These days, everything is disposable. We weren’t raised like that.”

Well, neither was I! And yet that cooler would’ve been out the door the second it came home lid-less.

It’s time to change my ways. I am pledging right now that I will not throw out … hmm, I have nothing left to throw out. It’s all gone.

Kelley said the cooler will get repurposed if its lid is never found.

“I just figure somebody might find a lid (out there on the water). It might have washed up,” Kelley said. “We don’t like to litter.”

My dream for Kelley is that there is another optimistic person out there, in this bright and sunny world, who once lost a cooler, but not the cooler lid, and that this person has held on to this lonely lid all these years, hoping against hope that one day there will be a match, another person who can complete this yellow Igloo cooler, which they would then timeshare.

It would be the beginning of a very outdoorsy friendship.

“This is so weird,” Kelley said, still laughing about my phone call. “I wish you were calling about the wicker table that I’m trying to sell.”

This story was originally published June 8, 2016 at 7:44 PM with the headline "Has anyone found the lid to this woman’s cooler? No, really.."