A little background. I am over 70 and my eyes are not what they were. Also I am not accustomed to laptops. I keep "losing my mouse" and it's really annoying.

I have been looking for something like the optional mouse trails that Windows used to do in the days when I used it (do they still do that, I wonder?). The only thing I could find was in gnome; I am using xfce and there's nothing relevant in the mouse settings.

Is there maybe a "find my mouse" application somewhere? An ap would be ideal, as I could use it on any desktop.

lxappearance

or manually by editing ~/.Xresources
google will tell you how to make it big and bright

change the mouse icon
there are red and bright green or yellow images for them
there are also animated ones that can flash

Try some different icon themes, with different mouse pointer shapes and sizes. I like Breeze. It's a little easier to see, and lets you resize the icon. You can resize most of them, for that matter, at least in Xfce. Adwaita is the default for Xfce, is resizable, but it's a little ugly IMO. But it's installed by default, so all you have to do is go to the mouse settings and change the pointer size.

It helps so much to have other minds in on this. I was thinking (and googling) about mouse trails because that's the way I remember Windows doing it. I never thought of changing the cursor itself!

I now have Amber Breeze and have enlarged the cursor from 20 to 30 pixels. I can see it very clearly, no matter where it is.

There is a bug in xfce which normally prevents new cursors from showing up except inside an application window, but I found a workaround for that.

I'm really annoyed with myself right now. We are always telling newbies in these forums to forget how they did things in Windows because Linux is different, and I fell into precisely that trap. After all these years of using Linux!

Well, we live and learn. Sometimes it's difficult to see the forest for the trees. But then we get on with life, and stop worrying about it.