No matter how you might try to prevent them, there are certain mysterious things that are going to happen in and around your house.
As someone who has had multiple homes in multiple states over the years, I can say that with complete certainty. Based on my experience, these are things that must be driven by an irrevocable force, because they’re going to take place whether a person likes it or not.
Like the way wires leading to or from an electronic device get tangled. This phenomenon has for a long time gotten my attention, because said wires can start out in perfect organization, but at some later point in time will be intertwined and wrapped around one another in a manner that at best doesn’t stand to reason and at worst seems to be of the paranormal realm.
It’s like they had to have help, but you just don’t want to believe some sort of “wire gnome” was giggling behind your entertainment center in the middle of the night while basically braiding speaker wire, interconnect cables and other stuff into a formation not even Sheldon Cooper could explain.
Or the way dust and dog hair can be counted on to gather in bundles.
My wife likes to call them “dust bunnies.” They most often form and congregate under or behind large, heavy objects, like couches, desks and major appliances. When my wife is gone for a few days and comes back into the house, she’s been known to literally call the bunnies out from their hiding places. Inevitably, they don’t cooperate, because that’s not in the nature of your standard dust bunny. Quite to the contrary – their goal is to be hard to find and hard to get at.
Oh, those clever bunnies.
And who hasn’t experienced the vanishing sock? You put two in the dryer, but only one comes out. You look for the missing unit, and it’s not stuck anywhere inside the dryer, it’s not on the floor near the dryer or in the path you took walking away from the dryer. It’s just nowhere.
But then, if you saw the Beatles’ movie, “Yellow Submarine,” then you know that “nowhere” might actually be a place. I submit that if that’s the case, then all the missing socks are likely being hoarded by the Nowhere Man, that colorful little guy who met members of the Fab 4 while he did nothing in Nowhere Land.
Hey, that’s as good an explanation as any.
And then there’s the way pens disappear from their normal storage place, the favorite cutting knife grows legs when you need it and then shows up later right out in the open on the kitchen counter, or the way that one bedroom door goes back to being hard to open or close after you were sure you had it freed up for good.
And speaking of kitchen counters, where does all that stuff come from that accumulates on them, and who in the Sam Hill puts it there?
Of course, those of you who own homes know that what I’ve shared here only scratches the surface of the subject. It’s part of a much greater set of circumstances that collectively form the mysteries of life.
And I believe those mysteries aren’t soon to be solved, and we who live in houses must simply accept that and move forward. Even when there’s an unexplainable stain on the tablecloth again or when we can’t find our keys again.
Doug Davison is a writer, photographer and newsroom assistant for the Houston Herald.
Email: ddavison@houstonherald.com.