WHERE DO THOSE LOST SOCKS GO?

When we moved from a suburban home to a city apartment 9 years ago, Libby made doing

the laundry her exclusive responsibility. To be honest, she always did more of the homemaking responsibilities, but I did some of the cooking and cleaning and related tasks.

But doing laundry in our new place was exponentially easier because it meant just going a few steps to the washing machine and dryer instead of carrying laundry back and forth from the second floor to the basement where our appliances were. Libby gained a renewed enthusiasm for doing laundry and seemed to thrive on it. In fact, it was not rare for me to wake up consecutive days to the sound of the washing machine.

There was one problem with the way that she did laundry wherever we lived. A few times a year she would lose one of my socks. I don’t know about you, but I would rather lose both socks of a pair – which I probably wouldn’t notice and would probably eventually forget that I had owned them – rather than to be left with one sock and hold out hope that its mate one will someday be found.

I used to threaten Libby that if I ever retired, I would take over the job of doing laundry because I definitely would not lose single socks. How hard could it be? Neither the washer nor dryer have hidden compartments where a sock could escape. It has to be human error.

Now that Libby’s death has forced me into being the sole person responsible for doing the laundry, I began proving my point and justifying my self-confidence as I went for almost 3 months without losing a sock. Then disaster struck and I lost 2 single socks within a 2-week period. I’ve done everything short of taking the appliances apart and I’ve still been unable to find them.

I know that I’m not the only one who has experienced this problem, so I’ve been trying to sort this out cognitively. Since Libby died a painless death after a relatively short illness where her major limitations were caused by weakness as the cancer progressed, I’ve become somewhat more religious – feeling gratitude to God for not letting her experience prolonged and painful suffering.

And this has led me to a religious interpretation of the missing sock problem. I think it may be God’s way of letting us know that there are some things that happen and the reasons why they happen are too complex for mere mortals to figure out. If that’s correct, I suspect that it happens in other areas of our lives – but an occasional lost sock is a reminder to keep things in perspective. There are some things we just aren’t meant to know.