Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

     I have been extremely busy lately just trying to keep caught up on house chores. I am not a fan of the cold and so many evenings I find myself curled up in my chair with a blanket over my lap which only leads to my head drooping and being startled awake by my own snoring somewhere around three a.m. So this afternoon I started to work on folding laundry with the intention of getting it all nicely done and tucked away firmly in the drawers which they belong.

     I’m a pro at towels. I can do anything from a washcloth to a beach towel in a matter of seconds, and even shirts and pants I’ve gotten pretty good at. Oh, don’t get me wrong, if you throw one of those fitted sheets at me, I’ll stumble around like I’m having a seizure in the middle of a middle school dance. More than anything that has me puzzled is where all of my socks end up and how that a perfectly good pair of socks could end up strung between three or four different loads and so many of them end up with holes in them.

     So I decided today between loads to do a little detective work. Unfortunately it turned out just as well as the time I tried to figure out how to watch the penguin come out of the back of the refrigerator and turn the light on and off. I started out to figure this out in the most scientific way. In the first load I put in four pair or white socks and one pair of my good dress socks. Yes, Mom I know I should separate my whites and colors but I’m lazy and expect most all of my clothes to be grey over time. I divided the other socks between the loads and started in. By the time the first load was out of the dryer I was missing one white sock and one of my good dress socks. At the end of the four loads, my dress socks did all show back up but I ended up missing one of my white socks and somewhere along the line ended up with a green and yellow striped sock that belongs to one of the girls.

     I’m beyond puzzled how the dance of the socks occurs when one does laundry and can’t find any good explanation for how it occurs. I had considered ripping apart the washer and dryer to see if the sock ended up hidden somewhere in the mechanics of the apparatus but someone borrowed my good Philips screwdriver so that wasn’t really an option. So I sat down and thought about it. Surely it had to been a ghost. That made perfect sense to me, the ghost of some poor farm wife had returned to steal my socks to take them back to use on her old washboard. Then it dawned on me that most all of the ghosts I’ve seen on television don’t have feet, so why would they need socks?

     I then considered fairies, you know like the tooth fairy. But anytime I have seen them it is in the woods and spring like, I’m here to tell you there is nothing forest or spring like in my bathroom, so that pretty much dispelled that idea. Vampires perhaps? They dress too nice and really would take my dress socks before white ones. A Sasquatch? Really….my feet aren’t anywhere big enough. Mice? Well I’m sure I have a mouse or two running around, but I’m guessing they don’t probably care to swim through detergent filled water to nab a sock.

     In the end the only thing I could come up with was the strange look that the cat continues to give me when I walk outside. Just the other day I noticed that she was curled up underneath of the place where the dryer vents outside the house enjoying the heat coming out of a load of towels. That got me to thinking about all the cats I’ve ever been around. They love socks. When Hannah was little we had a house cat and she loved to hide and swipe at your socks when you sat on the couch. Then there was the cat that decided to sneak into the house and have kittens in a pile of socks in the kid’s room one afternoon. Maybe socks are like mittens for kittens, but on a much bigger level. They’ve grown out of the kitten stage and now need something larger like a sock to make them happy. Of course, it makes perfect sense to me. It’s just another way that the cat is plotting against me and driving me insane. I’ve seen that cheesy grin she wears when I’m running out the door late for work with two different kinds of socks on because I can’t find a matching pair. It must be all a part of their plan to eventually take over the world in the great feline coup. We should probably all guard ourselves against this, and for myself I’m going to keep my eyes open for lost socks.

See you next week…remember, we’re all in this together.