After years apart, my winter boot socks finally found each other.

This would have been fantastic news for my toes if it wasn’t July. Who knows where those thick woolies will wander off to by the time the snow flies again?

I wasn’t even sure I still had two boot socks. A few winters ago, I laundered them. I never saw them together again. Every time I thought I’d located the second sock, the first wasn’t where I thought I left it. I began to suspect that there was no second sock, just the first, which roamed freely about the house.

I shall be getting married soon, which will help. As soon as she said she does, I can say I do to having someone else to blame for lost lots in life. Living solo narrows the field of suspects to a percentage not in my general favor.
But I know it’s NOT me. And thanks to the lesson of the laundered socks, I have figured it out:

The dryer did it.

I know blaming the clothes dryer for footwear vaporization sounds like profiling. But let’s be honest, dryers do have a long history of being the last place the other sock was seen.

What I didn’t know until now was if the vanishing trick was a permanent act of malice or merely a temporary tryst.

I suppose I can understand why so many socks disappear. They’re stepped on all day. And feet stink.

While we tend to think of socks as an identical pair — or 12 identicals when you buy bulk as I do — life teaches us that we’re all individuals with our own needs and thought patterns. That is why so often only one of what seems to be a clone feels the need to get away to a dark corner for quiet contemplation.

Or maybe the sock just got tired of its partner and developed a crush on a large, soft towel it met in the fluff cycle. A static electric attraction, perhaps?

The sock not taken is banished to a sad life: unused, unaired, jumbled together in the back of the drawer with all the other misfits and mismatches until the day the dryer finally coughs up its tardy twin.

But how do I explain the rest of the odd happenings around my house? My car keys sneak away only to reappear in the pocket of a shirt I don’t remember wearing. The book I was reading slithers beneath the couch cushions even though I was perusing it in bed two rooms away. And what about the time I found my power drill in the breakfast cereal cupboard? Weird.

It has to be the clothes dryer. That malevolent transporter of discontented socks also operates wormholes for everything from tools to telephones.

I’m not sure how something as bulky as my clothes dryer clunks its way around the house undetected so that it can move all my things. I only know that it does. There is no other explanation. At least not one that fits my satisfaction.

My greatest fear is that one day the dryer itself will be misplaced. It will end all hope that I’ll ever see my purple tuxedo again.

Actually, that one may not be the dryer. The fiancee acted rather suspiciously when I mentioned to her that my favorite crushed velvet suit had disappeared.

The dryer and I may not have to wait until the wedding to start shifting some of the blame elsewhere for the black hole in my home.