One Moment Of Discovery, Many Pieces Of Clothing

A tale of stolen underwear and a purloined Superman t-shirt 

I moved into Sara's house, with her blessing I may add, around 7 months ago and whilst I didn't arrive with much "stuff" I did have clothes.

These clothes have a tendency to get dirty and require a wash within a machine. Sara's machine, a "washing machine" is housed in a small laundry room.

As my clothes exhibit this "dirtiness" I would throw them on top of a basket before a critical amount is reached and the washing machine is brought into play.

This wicker basket is not my basket, it is in the domain of Sara and not for me to use.

Over the months this regular cycle of piling up dirty clothes on top of the basket (it has a lid, not my basket to put stuff in) before chucking them in to be washed and hung up to dry outside to dry has kept me going.

Sort of.

I do recall in the early days wondering where my Superman t-shirt had got to. I checked all my drawers and just put it down to being mislaid. Or even perhaps taken off the washing line. It is a cool blue colour and has the Superman logo on it so I can understand why someone would, under the cover of darkness, sneak onto the property to steal it.

Life went on.

Clothes were washed.

I started to run out of socks, but they were getting old and I knew I'd need to buy some new ones anyway. And maybe I didn't actually have that many.

My favourite undies seemed to have gone missing, but I had plenty of others.

In the past few months a tickle in the back of my mind has been with me. A nagging whisper, "Didn't you have more t-shirts than this Mike?".

When I woke of a morning I'd ponder, "Oh, I thought I had more clothes than this." Of course the Superman t-shirt had been stolen, we all knew that had gone.

Last Tuesday.

I was off to Wellingtontownland for a number of days and would need to pack for the time away.

"WHERE THE FUCK ARE ALL MY T-SHIRTS???"

I had even less than I had the week before, this was just fucking annoying. I searched in every drawer I have, I looked under the bed, I looked in the wardrobe where my collared shirts are hanging up. Nothing.

"WHAT THE FUCK!!", is someone stealing my stuff off the line and has made a grab for it all?

I paced around the house, muttering angrily to myself and explaining in great deal what I would do to those bastards, those total clothes stealing bastards.

I looked in the garage.

I looked behind the trees.

I looked in my car.

This is not as mad as it sounds, there's still moving out stuff in the boot, in fact the hoover only came out 3 weeks ago and the massive collection of tiny candles is still in there somewhere.

I'm now pacing with attitude.

Into the laundry and I look in, around, and under the washing machine. I peak inside Sara's wicker basket.

WTF!

Sara's wicker basket is full. To the brim. Of my clothes. I reach in to see if it's just the top layer, and it's not, it's all my clothes all the way to the bottom. There's even a glorious blue t-shirt waving at me from deep inside.

HA HA HA HA HA.

It transpires that early in the Mike Lives Here times Sara thought that I was using that wicker basket for my dirty clothes. Whenever she saw something casually thrown on top she'd pop it inside and over the months it slowly hid away all my clothes.

Today, I washed everything.