Sometimes, our fellow humans do things that the rest of us can’t understand. Like stealing placenta from a freezer that’s not yours, or shaving cats’ bellies without the owner’s consent. Or swiping a kindly old grandmother’s lawn gnomes from her garden.
That’s what happened to Martha Horne, who discovered that three of her gnomes—of which she has collected over a dozen—had disappeared after a particularly stormy night. She told CBC:
“I thought, Oh God where are my gnomes? I looked a couple of times. I thought, am I not seeing right? But there was just one gnome left. I was very upset.”
She says the gnomes, each weighing nearly 10 pounds, were gifts from her grandchildren. Even worse, she’d spent time lovingly repainting them all, and now some heartless thief had made off with them in the night. They’re described as having “funny faces, like old timers’ faces.”
Horne called the cops, as any reasonable victim of a gnome-theft might, and the police drove around her neighborhood looking for anyone bold enough to put the stolen gnomes in their own front lawns. No luck.
“I got them as gifts from my grandchildren so I really treasured them,” she said. “They were very special to me. In my own mind, in my own heart, I hope I can get them back.”
