On our drive to Ohio for Thanksgiving, I thought about socks. Six hours is a long time in the car, and you know, your mind wanders.

Specifically, I was thinking about the clothes our son packed for himself, which included a mismatched pair of socks – both were white, but one had a gray bottom and one had a navy bottom. I had just done all the laundry, so he should have had plenty of socks, but mysteriously, he did not. Those were the dregs from his drawer. So I got to wondering, where could his socks be? We just bought him a new package a few weeks ago, and if I had just washed everything, he should have had at least six clean pairs of socks in his drawer. And then I recalled the balled up sock behind the bathroom door. That one was red. And the sock I found in his sheets when he got out of bed that morning. I think that one was gray.

And then I recalled the socks we’ve found on the basement floor, under the couch, between couch cushions. On the oval rug in the middle of the living room. In a LEGO bin. And it was no wonder he only had three pairs of socks (one mismatched).

Then I got to thinking about my girlfriend telling me she has the same issue with her husband. He’ll be getting ready for work in the morning and holler, “I need new socks – I don’t have any” when she knows good and well he’s got at least twelve pairs. Half a pair is on the kitchen counter. Several dusty ones are behind the couch. There’s one on the coffee table, and three or four between the couch cushions. I think she said she has even found her husband’s socks between the mattresses.

I chuckled to myself in the car, thinking of her husband plunking down on the couch after a long day at work, settling into his favorite spot, clicking over to a Braves game, maybe munching on some chips. Then, feeling the need to wiggle his toes in fresh air, to free his paws after another day of work-shoe imprisonment, I could see him peeling his socks off as the final step in his putting-his-feet-up ritual.

Once we were in Ohio, I didn’t think much about socks, except to wish I had brought one more pair of black ones to go with my black boots. And then, the day after Thanksgiving, Aunt C plucked a sock from the end table in her husband’s football den, rolled her eyes and shook her head, and delivered it to its rightful place in the hamper. I laughed and told her about my sock musings in the car, and we teased about men and their socks, me feeling self-satisfied about my socks always being where they belong – in the drawer, on my feet, or in the hamper.

I was still chuckling about the socks when I walked into the living room and noticed, scattered across our hosts’ floor, a pair of slippers, two black bootlets, and tossed about like the kids had gotten ahold of them (though they hadn’t), a pair of tall brown boots. All mine.

* Our son’s birthday is Thursday, and we’re moving this weekend, and then our daughter’s birthday and Christmas will be upon us, so this is the sort of gripping content you can expect here over the next few weeks when I get a chance to post. Enjoy!