Orphan Sock Week

There is considerable cyber ink being generated this week on the fun topic of Orphan Socks. We all have them, the lone (or many more than one) mateless socks that we find in our sock drawer, hamper or dryer.

Growing up in a family of eleven people, my mom had an orphan sock hamper. It was the place where mateless socks went to languish until either they found their mate or she got so sick of seeing how many orphans one family could generate before she turned them into cleaning rags or worse just pitched them out.

We in the angelmeg household have an old apple crate (I think it might be a bushel sized one, but not having grown up on a farm I could be wrong on the proportion) that holds our orphans until they befall the same fate. Except I got wise on one issue. For mr angelmeg as well as Son and heir, I always purchase exactly the same brand of sock (son and heir gets the grey variety to keep them seperate) That way rather than having to match up pairs of socks I just have to match up brands. The two men have entirely fewer socks in the orphan bin than we women who tend to wear, shall I say, more colorful varieties of sock.

When we came down to Florida five weeks ago I requested that each person only pack a few pairs of socks so I didn't think I would have a problem with orphans, and yet, somehow that first week when I did the laundry I came up with one mateless sock.

Hmmmm, there are three plausible explainations for why this happened . . .

1) beautiful autistic daughter brought an extra sock in her suitcase, just in case . . . and believe me this is a definitely plausible option.

2) the washer down here decided it was hungry for a small white sock (I have heard many legends from my mother about washers being sockivores)

or

3) the mate to this particular sock decided that it wasn't seeing enough of the Gulf Coast, and went on a little walkabout of it's own. (It could happen, as Jerry Seinfeld used to say, if you ever see a sock by the side of the road . . . it is one that didn't make it)

My dilema now is; do I keep the sock until we go home in hopes that the mate turns up, or do I pack it in and throw this poor mateless darling out right now and spare myself the mysery, knowing full well that if I do that I will be sure to find the mate pining away in beautiful autistic daughter's sock drawer back home? It is a puzzlement.

Pax