It happens to many of us from time to time. Something goes missing, is “misplaced,” and – no matter how hard we look, and in how many places, tracing and retracing our steps, looking under furniture, emptying drawers, thinking and rethinking, “Now where would I have put that to keep it safe?” – it remains unfound, disappeared, inexplicably vanished, just gone.

This happened to me recently. My wife and I have a marriage-long agreement. She hates grocery stores and I hate laundry, so we agreed when we got married, not really a part of our vows, but just as binding, that I would do time in the Shop Rite, Whole Foods or wherever, and she would be enslaved to the washer and drier. It hardly seems fair now that weekly groceries are delivered and I only go to the dreaded Retail establishments biweekly, and the weekly laundry is ubiquitous and interminable, but a deal is a deal and we seem to be sticking to it.

Billie even folds my laundry. It’s above and beyond and I’ve said as much, but there is no way her hyper-organized being could tolerate my stuffing dresser drawers with unfolded laundry, and the state of my perpetual wrinkled-ness that would ensue. So Saturday afternoons I am confronted with a stack of tee shirts, briefs and socks on top of my chest of drawers.

One Saturday there sat, next to the stack, a single unmatched gray and brown striped Darn Tough sock.

“What happened to the mate for this?”

“I don’t know. I looked everywhere. It’s not in the dryer, or the washer or the laundry hamper or the basket. It disappeared. The dryer probably ate it.”

The people from whom we bought our house either got a bargain or were particularly enamored with Samsung appliances. Billie hates them all. She mostly dislikes the, at least, counter-intuitive and, at most, unergonomic design. She finds the little electronic tunes they play, at the beginning or end of cycles or to gently remind you that you’ve left the fridge door ajar, especially annoying. She is therefore quite willing to blame the appliances for any mishaps around them.

The dryer has eaten things before. I blamed the dryer for the perpetual holes that developed in the left elbow of my favorite long sleaved polo shirts. That seemed to go away when I repaired the vinyl covering on the left arm of my office chair, but I believe that the dryer has just gone underground to throw us off the scent.

I place the unmatched sock on the top of my dresser.

I took everything out of the socks and underwear drawer looking for a static cling induced obfuscation. I looked under beds, dressers, hampers, and went through the trash, all the places Billie had looked before me. No joy. Especially no sock.

I left the sock on top of the dresser for not one, but two laundry cycles, realizing that throwing it out would guarantee the sock would reappear silently chanting “Nanny nanny boo boo. I put one over on you.”

“Well, maybe Dobby is free,” I said and we both laughed.

For anyone, who hasn’t read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books or watched the movies, Dobby is the house elf that Harry, intrepid wizard-in-training, frees from slavery to the evil wizard Malfoy, by tricking Malfoy into giving Dobby a sock. Evidently a master giving a house elf an article of clothing is emancipating. Dobby is also a nickname for Robert, and a generic term for a mischievous house spirit that helps with household chores in return for offerings.  In Harry Potter Dobby dies on Freshwater Beach in Wales where now in real life, the National Trust asks people to STOP leaving socks and treats and other environmental hazards and dangers to wildlife. “Dobby is free now and has moved on.”

Gremlins were the prankish spirits that World War II Royal Air Force pilots blamed for the unexplained mechanical glitches caused by Murphy’s Law, (“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong”). Poltergeists are typically noisy ghosts, making loud noises or causing breakables to supernaturally fall off shelves, but are sometimes blamed for things mysteriously moving from room to room. Perhaps a gremlin or a poltergeist had my sock.

This Saturday morning I arose after Billie. This is normal. She is a morning person and I am definitely not. I groggily pulled a tee shirt and briefs from the drawer, headed for the shower. There on the hardwood, three feet from the dresser was a single unmatched sock.

“Oh,” thinks I, “musta knocked it off the dresser.”  I picked up the recalcitrant foot covering and turned to replace it on the dresser, where to my shock I saw the other sock still in place.

“BILLIE!? Did you put this here?” My wife assured me that she did not.

We laughed about Dobby again, decided that, despite my looking through that drawer several times, the sock must have been stuck to my tee shirt or underpants. After my shower, we ate breakfast, talked about Dobby, and how if we got another dog we might name him or her Dobby, and the names that didn’t make the cut when we each named our children, and swirling Celtic designs we both liked. We talk a lot about random things, and laugh. Silly, but it’s better than bickering, which we also do, but the nattering is more enjoyable.

Then I went upstairs to write this post.

“Is this the same sock?”

I looked up and Billie was holding a single unmatched gray Darn Tough sock.

“I don’t think so.” I took off my shoes. “Nope these have brown stripes and that has yellow stripes.”

“Well, I can only find the one. I’ve looked through all the laundry and the other one is NOT there.”

“DOBBY!”

“He is messin’ with you for sure.”