Laundered

I needed to wash some stuff this morning, which invariably means finally emptying the dryer of its contents so the new wash can go in there and, if said new wash can stay without becoming wrinkly, it will stay in the dryer until the next wash, repeating the process. Not that it takes a long time to retrieve freshly dried items, I'm just usually headed somewhere by the time the drying process begins and, upon my return, I have forgotten about the stuff in the dryer. Or gone to bed. Or both.

Terribly exciting, I know, but whilst retrieving the dry stuff in preparation for the new wash-that-will-be-dried today I noticed something I thought was odd. The contents of the dryer was mostly socks, a few terrycloth rags, but mostly socks. As I pulled the socks from the dryer, only one sock was not turned inside out. Now, I don't remember taking the socks off like that because it would have annoyed me, I hate the feel of socks peeling off backwards, must be a childhood thing, plus it ruins the elastic at the top, I think. I also don't remember putting them in the wash like that. In fact, it would have annoyed me, I think, as I would have thought "you'll have to turn them all right side out while you're retrieving these socks seven days later when you need to wash something else." (My mind thinks in Jane Austen, stilted type dialogue, I guess.)

You bet it annoyed me. It added a few minutes to the task, minutes I should have been using to fix Saint Francis' toes, or give him something new to wear, or else minutes I should have been surfing around the Internet pretending something new was there to thrill me. But instead I wasted time turning socks right side out.

Thus I'm forced to conclude there was some odd cosmic conflagration which bent time and space, and, rather than enveloping my socks in that special dimension where missing socks go, instead managed to turn all but one of my socks wrong side out. Of this I am certain.

If only the conflagration would have returned my missing black socks, and I'm not talking about the odd pair here or there. I'm definitely talking about whole packages of black socks turning up missing, though gradually (they're insidious that way, of course). I don't know what it is, but, there must be yet another special dimension for them. Only the ancient black socks, those going threadbare, seem to stick around.

Now the new wash has finished and, since the dryer is empty at least for the moment, the contents, sheets, will go tumbling. They are too large and knowledgeable about theoretical quantum physics to turn up missing. So far.