Living Alone Means Never Losing Your Socks

Ink & watercolor (larger)

I was folding my laundry and admiring my collection of wonderful SmartWool socks when it struck me: I haven’t lost a single sock since I began living alone. When I was married with kids, socks disappeared on a regular basis and I had a drawerful of one-of-a-kind socks.

My son still comes over to do his laundry but even so, only one sock temporarily migrated but he brought it back (a year later at the insistence of his girlfriend), along with a pair of my undies that had somehow ended up in his laundry.

There’s pros and cons to living alone, of course. One downside is that if you do lose something, you have nobody to blame for it. Even now, when something goes missing, my first thought is that one of my sons must have taken it. But my only available scapegoats are my cats.

Fiona the calico does like to steal my SmartWool socks (maybe they smell a bit like animals, being made of wool?). I try to keep them away from her, since she tosses them around and wrestles with them and when I find them under the bed they are shredded and holey.

At least she doesn’t eat them. My friend Marean has a beautiful Sheltie who eats her socks whole, and has had to have stomach surgery to have a “sock-ectomy.”