The last couple of weeks Guinevere and I have repeatedly passed by a house on the parkway with one toddler’s pink shoe sitting on the front post of someone’s house. It is still in good shape (despite a couple of storms) but it does look a little forlorn. If YA had lost this shoe as a toddler, I might have re-traced our steps to find it but there are probably several good reasons why the shoe remains all by itself.
It makes me think about the socks that go missing in life. This time of year I spend more time thinking about socks; winter socks are bigger and harder to mis-placed. I mostly wear little no-show socks (if I’m wearing shoes) and I often find one of the missing when I fold up my weekly laundry. I’ve developed a short process when this happens.
As I sort and fold laundry, I tend to shake it out a bit. If a sock is missing, I may unfold, shake and refold any likely suspects who might be holding onto a sock, especially the fitted sheet. If that doesn’t turn up the missing footwear, then I head down to the basement to check the dryer and the washing machine. If I am still single-socked, then I put the lonely sock into a little box that I keep in my closet. Then when its mate shows up, I put them together and replace them in the sock drawer.
Eventually I go through the single sock box and get rid of any inmates who have been there for a long long time. Right now there are four socks in the box and none of them are likely to get paired up again.
How to you deal with lost socks, shoes, gloves? Do you have a process? How long to you keep single items before despairing of finding their mates?
Trail Baboon 
My process for locating missing socks, either mine or Robin’s, when sorting laundry is essentially identical to yours.
For myself, when a sock goes missing or one of a pair develops holes, I put it singly in my sock drawer. Since I basically have only two kinds of socks, sooner or later another one goes missing or wears out and the single in the drawer gets a new mate.
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This is a wonderful process unless you’re like me and you have way more socks than one person needs and not one pair of the matches another! I think I’m switching over to your system, but I have to buy all new socks.
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Spot on. My socks are either black or white. No fancy colors. All the same type. Heck, I don’t even need to ball them together.
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I have a few single socks sitting on top of my dresser. Yesterday I put on slacks I haven’t worn for many years. One of the single sock’s pair showed up on the floor. So does that mean I should check all my slacks and jeans I don’t wear anymore? Cynthia “Life is a shifting carpet…learn to dance.”
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Pretty haphazard for me. If I lose a sock or a glove or some other paired item, I’ll put it apart from the others and just wait until either the mate shows up or I get tired of looking at the survivor and chuck it into the rag bin or the trash.
I only get upset if the sock or glove is relatively new. But looking inside pant legs after they’ve been washed is a good tactic. Lots of things appear in there. Also, check the inside of long-sleeved shirts or washable sweaters.
Chris in Owatonna
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The question for me is always how long should I wait. Cynthia’s comment is up point to waiting a long time. What happens if I throw out the single sock and then six months later find it in a pair of pants? That has actually happened to me and it makes me crazy.
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Piet Hein wrote a Grook about that, sorta:
‘Consolation Grook’
Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.
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It only happens occasionally, and I usually find the missing sock, but when a sock mate mysteriously disappears I just put the single one back in the sock drawer. Usually I find the mate to it within a week. There is nowhere for one sock to go at my house so most of the time it will turn up inside a pair of fleece pants or the corner of a fitted sheet. It could be a long time before the mate is found if it’s spring and I stop wearing fleece. If it takes a long time, the single sock might work its way down to the bottom of the sock drawer where it might linger indefinitely. There are rarely more than one or two of these and the situation almost always resolves in less than a few months.
Missing items frustrate me. I think it is a small symptom of my mild OCD. I always think I know where everything is, if it is my possession. One benefit of a small home is that there are fewer places to lose things.
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Rise and Shine, Baboons,
My strategy is not much different than what was already described. But the whole concept of the Single Life iis really a mystery. Especially the one tennis shoe in the middle of highway or the edge of the road. Why? How? Does someone put one shoe on while putting the other on toop of the car, forget it is there or forget that he/she has on only one shoe, tae off in the car, and it flies off the roof?
OT. WP is nearly impossible to use for me right now, so it limits my likes (cannot like) and comments. Tired of logging in all the time. On top of those two chronic issued, WP shrinks its own window making it too small to read and interact. This is really frustrating. The window I am peering at is so samll I can hardly see it.
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It’s obviously your equipment. WordPress never has faults.
Kidding, of course. I’m having similar problems. I’ve noticed that when the window shrinks, clicking on the empty spot to the right will bring it up again.
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Nice new Gravatar, Bill.
I haven’t been able to “like” anything for at least six months, and I have had to sign in for every single comment that I want to make for at least that long as well.
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The only thing that worked for me was eventually going to a new internet service provider.
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There is a short, grey, sock destroying machine named Kyrill in our home. It is a game for him. He lurks around the washing machine, dryer, and clothes baskets to steal socks, and if he gets one he goes under a bed or in his crate and has them chewed up in less than a minute. He really likes my cotton rag socks for some reason.
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“I know you are but what am I?!”
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My issue with socks is that favorite (colored)ones wear out at different rates. I try and wait till I have another similarly colored sock that’s a solo, and can get by with wearing both of them at the same time.
When I was making doll clothes for my neighbor Lola, I found that the stretchy tops of worn out socks could be cut off and used as a skinny topless dress for, say, a Barbie doll. : )
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The solution, obviously, is to make wearing unmatched socks your signature fashion statement.
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I’ve worn unmatched sock for years. If someone comments on them, and hardly anyone ever does, I simply say “Oh, I have a pair at home just like them.”
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: ) : )
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YES! This! Matched socks are over-rated. I learned that from daughter. And I wear a compression sock on my left leg, and a regular black crew sock on my right. So my socks never match anyway. And since I’m rarely in shorts, no one cares. If it’s really hot, I might wear the ankle socks.. but then no ankle brace either.
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has no one ever pointed out that the odds of anyone noticing that you have a different sock on your left foot then you have on your right foot is remote, and I often wear a brown glove on one hand and a black glove on the other or a mitten on one hand, and a glove on the other matched smatched, it doesn’t matter to me at all
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Agreed.
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When I was in high school, I apparently habitually wore bright yellow socks. I don’t remember it myself, but several persons mention it in the inscriptions in my yearbooks. I’m assuming they were bright yellow and not the sort of dingy yellow you would get from ineptly washed socks. It must have been quite daring or they wouldn’t have mentioned it.
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do you remember Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire wearing colorful sky, blue or bright, yellow or purple socks to accentuate their feet when they were dancing
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When I was 15, maybe 16, dark blue and bottle green tights were quite the rage. If you were really daring, they also came in firetruck re. Of course, those were the ones I liked and wore. A couple of friends bought me a pair in bright yellow and dared me to wear them. I did, of course, and there was no end to the ribbing I got over them, so naturally I kept wearing them though I really didn’t care for them myself. The red ones were cool, though. The early women libbers in Denmark were commonly referred to a “rødstrømper”, I was off to an early start.
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That’s what I am, an unmatched worn out sock.
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I can imagine it feels like that, Clyde.
Sigh…
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And we still love ya Clyde.
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hopefully they can darn you and get your back in shape and it’s not possible for a sock to be a pair. It can only be a sock
lonesome George Gobel add a line on the Johnny Carson show that he feels like all the world is a tuxedo and he’s a pair of brown shoes. Sounds like a similar sentiment.
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I remember liking George Gobel’s sense of humor…
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I found a shoe similar to the one in the photo a few years ago. Thought someone might come back looking for it, so I put a plant prop on the boulevard and dangled the shoe from it. If there was rain in the forecast, I would take the shoe in till it passed, and then hang it out again. One day the shoe was gone, and I felt a small sense of victory. But the following spring the shoe turned up under some hosta foliage, and it was in pretty sorry shape by then.
My late kitty Isabel was a terrible sock thief, so I got used to not being able to find socks over the nineteen years I shared a home with her. I don’t mind unmatched socks, and I’m going to use PJ’s defense from now on if I get any grief about it.
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