The Joy of Socks........

  

 When you look around you at all the mysterious things in this world my question might not seem so important.   After all…we will never know how they built the pyramids, or what Stone Henge is really all about.  I question whether we’ll ever understand why we are born, age and die.   Those things are for bigger minds than ours.  I can live with that.

   BUT DO YOU THINK SOMEONE COULD FIGURE OUT WHERE SOCKS GO WHEN YOU PUT

                                                                      THEM      

                                                 IN THE DOGGONED WASHER????????? 

My husband and I have been together for a lot of years.   We have raised three beautiful children into adulthood, and now they are raising their own families.   But when they lived at home not one of us was ever be able to figure out where a lifetime of family socks went.

At one point we had in our basement laundry room a basket that any snake charmer would have envied.  It was three feet tall and round, made of some exotic natural reed woven by a bare skinned native woman in a country far, far way.    I purchased it at World Market for over ten thousand times what that bare skinned basket weaver was paid, and I brought it to my nice cool basement to solve the mystery of the socks.

My plan was this:  Each child/adult would take his or her pair of socks and force the toes of the pair through a brightly colored plastic ring.  These had been carefully selected, along with the beautiful basket, to hold two socks together in the wash, guaranteeing matching socks for our family of five.  I was in the middle of this organizational binge after being unable to find socks for school one morning, and the result was my daughter had to go to gym class with taupe knee highs rolled down into her gym shoes.

After frantically searching through hundreds of mismatched socks that I could swear I had never seen before, I sank to my knees on the basement floor (Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind) and proclaimed, “I swear we’ll never go sockless again.” 

And so, for years we filled that basket with socks.  The plastic rings only lasted through two wash days, and then they too disappeared.   About once a month I’d dig down a foot or so into the basket and match up enough socks to keep Children’s Services satisfied, but I never found a system to put two matching socks into the washer and remove two matching socks from the dryer.   

So……where do they go?  I estimate over the twenty years of raising three kids, a husband with dress socks, me with knee highs and golf socks, we have shelled out ten thousand dollars in sock money….easy.

It’s not like I threw them away, I swear!  Many years after I bought the beautiful basket we got a new puppy, and when she took it upon herself to consume the bottom row of basket weave we found baby socks!   My kids were teenagers at the time, so these socks were obviously reappearing in this dimension from a parallel world.

I thought maybe the kids were trying to “gaslight” me for a while, but when they grew up and moved out the trend continued.   The long ago basket has been replaced several times, but all the containers seem to be home to a vortex into that same parallel world that only one sock at a time is permitted to enter. 

I may not know much about the Druids or space aliens or the canals on Mars, but this I do know...somewhere there is a graveyard that holds mismatched socks, paper clips and hair bands.  It belongs to no one, but everyone contributes.  It is more difficult to find than the Lost Dutchman’s Mine….but someday, someone will find it!    Then, maybe we’ll have the answer to the age old question:  “Have you seen my socks?”        

                                                            Life is good.