Sometimes, Ya Just Gotta Go Through Stuff

I’ve been putting things away for, I don’t know, a couple hundred years now.

Look.  When your place is the size of an ambitious postage stamp, and the only bathroom has been under construction since October, the other rooms tend to fill with boxes, with towels, with the surprising number of things that will find their eventual way into your new bathroom. 

The bathroom finished, I am now free to repopulate it with the many bottles, tubes, serums, nostrums, and detritus that were in the old bathroom.

An excellent time to organize, that’s what this is.  Hair stuff over here; over-the-counter medicines over here, bath products over here –

“That’s Amy’s towel, you know,” he says.

I look up from the patch of carpet I’ve called home for the last 45 minutes.  “What?”

“The pink one,” he says, pointing.  “That’s Amy’s.”

I frown at the towel.  Frankly, I’ve always been suspicious of this one.  In a sea of blues and brown, this one is a rosy pink.

I’ve been folding this bit of terrycloth for at least three years.

“Really?”  I continue to frown in that charming, wrinkled way I have.  “Why is it here?”

Willie scratches the back of his neck, shrugs.  “I have no idea why you guys do what you do,” he says. 

Willie has just lumped all women together in a vast, towel-swapping cabal.

I stare at him, then at the towel.  I try to envision a situation in which I told Amy “everybody’s bringing towels”.

We don’t have a pool.

Our parties are never “BYOT”.

Giving up, Willie wanders back to the Green Bay game.

I pick up the phone, fold Amy’s towel one last time. 

Laughingly, Amy tells me she has pink towels but can’t imagine why I would have one of them. 

I hang up, perplexed.

This is going to bug me for a while.