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Thursday, April 30, 2015

When You Start Going Through Things...

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 Thunder 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. 

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Both you and Amy will sit up half the night stewing over that pink towel. It's probably Mary's.

Yamini MacLean said...

Hari OM
...... hmmmm... am torn between yelling "Don't go there!!!!" and ... "WT..."

YAM xx

savannah said...

Having just sorted out the linen closet here on the plantation, I understand your vexation, sugar! But, don't give how it got there another thought, just put the towel in a bag and write "Amy" on it, then put the bag in another room. Problem solved! ;) xoxoxo

vanilla said...

And you don't wonder hows come Willie knows whose towel it is?

jenny_o said...

Cut it up for cleaning rags and be done with it. Amy doesn't care, and it will (eventually) be gone!

ThreeOldKeys said...

A: you and amy were together one day at her house ... you had gotten drenched in the rain, and she lent you a towel. you brought it home to wash it.

B: a cat burglar stole it and brought it back to her lair.

Anonymous said...

Maybe a stray red towel and a white one had sex, and--voila--the pink towel was born.

River said...

Just buy a matching towel so the pink one will no longer be alone.

Diane Stringam Tolley said...

Pink towels make me suspicious also . . .