Trolls in the laundry

Where do lost socks go? I vividly remember the veritable cemetery of socks that my mom collected when I was a child. Mostly my father's, the socks were all blues and grays and blacks who'd lost their partner forever.

Right now, in my laundry room, I have one white and one black sock pining despairingly for their mates. I wish I could marry them and be done with it but the sock world is one in which there's no such thing as inter-color unions.

And while in my childhood home of five it was not surprising that socks would be spirited away by the trolls in the laundry, in my adult home of two it's a lot harder, especially since I really work hard at trying to keep the socks married forever.

But there must be trolls in my laundry, too. I'd like to think they use the socks as materials to fashion the little sails of the galactic ships in which they sail though the universe at night, wriggling themselves into laundry rooms through the dryer exhaust pipes to kidnap unsuspecting socks.

Instead, one or the other sock is probably caught (again) in the old aluminum laundry chute. Still, I like the galactic-ship-sail story better as an explanation for why socks go missing in the night without warning.