My Great Nemesis

I have a great nemesis.  Now perhaps the word 'nemesis' conjures up thoughts of Marvel Comic villains such as Lex Luthor or the Joker.  Or maybe it brings to mind that girl back in high school who always seemed to be able to 'one up' you in every possible way.  But for me, my great and formidable foe is a heaping basket of unmatched socks.

My nemesis lurks in the laundry room, daring me to take him on.  It is not a challenge I take lightly.  Many a day I have sought to defeat this mortal enemy only to retreat in utter despair.  He seems to laugh at me as he produces one mismatched sock after another, wearing me down with the sheer enormity of his arsenal.  

I have tried many a tactic to outwit my worthy rival. I started out trying to buy each boy a very distinctive style of sock...short black socks for this boy, tall white socks for another, and something with a colored heel for the third.  That should have made partnering them up quick and easy.  But somehow both socks never ended up hitting the laundry at the same time.  The random stray would later be found under the couch or tucked inside a shoe.  His perfect match would then take up residence in that blasted basket.


For a while, I tried to make sure only mated pairs went into the washer.  It was a huge inconvenience, not to mention a big irritation, to sort through dirty socks and hold on to the unmated ones until their counterparts revealed themselves.  But even going through such painstaking efforts didn't guarantee getting mated pairs back at the  end.  I was fairly certain my great adversary and the dryer were in cahoots on that one.

So with four males in the house, all wearing the same size socks, I decided I would just buy them all the same socks so everything would match everything else.  It sounded like the perfect plan to me.  But somehow, even two white socks fail to mate when one is white as snow and another is dingy brown from going through who knows what.   


And then there's the dress socks.  One blue. One black. One brown.  One with stripes.  One argyle. But a common theme among them all...just one of each.  All of them coming together in one place...that infernal laundry basket!

Unfortunately, it isn't only unmatched socks piling up against me.  That one dreaded laundry basket has become a depository for a plethora of old soccer and football socks.  I don't know how many pair of thick, knee high, never-to-be-worn-again athletics socks he has taken possession of, but he does so to my chagrin.    It isn't that anything is 'wrong' with these orphaned socks.  But one year on the red team and another one on the green team times three boys times multiple sports has produced a lot of socks over the years.  Many have made their way to Goodwill but many still have taken up residence with my archenemy. 


But last week, with Christmas coming and new socks on the way, I waged an all out war against my great opponent.  With reckless abandon, I overturned him, spilling his sizable accumulation of form fitting footwear onto the living room floor.  I gave everyone in the house a minute...maybe less...to quickly pluck from the pile anything they deemed worthy of saving.  And then, with no regard for whether anything else might be salvageable (which has been my downfall on many a prior occasion), I made one final brutal assault against my longtime opponent.  With a sigh of relief and a feeling of victory deep in my belly, I scooped everything up and threw it all away.  Having left my former foe completely decimated, I smiled with delight and proclaimed a new day...a new day for laundry at our house.


From now on, every man, woman and child in this house is responsible to wash, dry, fold and put away his or her own socks.  We have each been doing our own regular laundry for quite some time so this seems like a very reasonable, even ingenious solution to my sock problem.  However, I know from past experience to never underestimate this great nemesis of mine.  I will definitely keep my guard up...and my laundry sorted.