Where to begin…let’s see…ok. The mystery begins in my bathroom. More specifically, the cleaning of my bathroom. If you know me well, you know that cleaning my bathroom is my own personal Hell. Why? I don’t know. It just is. Truth be told, cleaning is a complete have-to for me. I’m a little teensy bit on the obsessive-compulsive side, so I fight to keep my inner anti-cleaning demons from causing me to be ridiculous about NOT wanting to touch unsavory bathroom surfaces. And when it becomes absolutely necessary, I tend to try as much as possible to clean the toilet, for instance, in the dark. I then turn on the light when scrubbed to inspect. Although the sink doesn’t present as much of a problem, I still view it as taking my attention and energy from fun creative things like writing, or looking through 100’s of online pages of fabric, or watching channeling videos, or anything other than cleaning.

So yesterday when I got the urge to thoroughly scrub my sink, I knew I had to go all in to make it shine again before I found an excuse not to. I generally accomplish this by soaking loads of paper towels in cleaning vinegar and covering the entire sink and faucet with them to eat away at whatever while I go back to the next online page of fabrics. I had an interior decorating business for many years, so fabrics are endlessly entertaining, especially since I need new top treatments for the living room. Anyhoo, I also filled a sandwich bag full of vinegar and attached it to the faucet, a trick I learned from the best cleaner I ever employed. That man would enter my home with his knee pads on, ready to fiercely attack every speck of dust and grime. I loved him!. Where is he now that I need him the most? Sigh… 

Well, to get back to the story, as an extra added measure I poured vinegar down the drain and closed the stopper. “There!” I muttered to myself. “That should take care of the horror in the trap bend in the pipes too!” You see, that area is almost as bad as the thought of the toilet germs. Now please don’t judge me for poisoning the groundwater with all that extra strength vinegar. I will adequately judge myself later. I honestly try to be a good steward of the environment, but gosh darn it! I’m flawed! There. I admit it. Anyhoo, again…I successfully got my sink to sparkle except for the lingering vinegar smell. I rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. Couldn’t get rid of it. But I soldiered on. Moving on to doing laundry and peeking at fabric in between loads.

All was well the rest of the evening until I realized I had totally sapped my energy reserves. This usually shows up at bedtime with a very restless slumber. So around 6 am I dragged myself out of bed after spotty sleep to go to the bathroom. I never turn on the light for fear of waking up completely, preventing me from getting a bit more sleep. So as I reached for the toilet paper, I remembered that I only had 1 roll in reserve in the sink cabinet. I’d better check. Don’t want to get caught without an extra. So after washing my hands, I reached in the lower cabinet and touched what made me recoil in disgust. A gob of sopping wet toilet paper! I quickly turned on the light, trying to squint through very sleepy, brain-fogged eyes to make out what I had touched. 

“Oh. My. God! How did this happen?” I quietly yelled so as not to awaken the rest of the household. I stood trying to make a speedy plan to remove the falling apart roll to the bathroom trash can in order to not drip vinegar on my newly installed Luxury Vinyl Tile bathroom floor. (It’s a stunning glazed tile look of dusty olive green with a touch of a soft, very subtle, undertone of blue-green. I love it! Oh sorry…there I go again.) I managed to get the roll into the trash in tact, then my eyes finally focused on what appeared to be a small mountain of sopping microfiber cloths and sponges, some kind of tall can of hairspray that must have been in that corner for at least 7-8 years, empty containers that I probably kept because they were ‘useful,’ and the original shower head that I replaced almost 10 years ago when we moved into our newly built home. Yuck, and yuck again! All reeked of vinegar. Aha! That’s where the lingering smell came from! A veritable pond, or at least a puddle, of vinegar water, extra strength vinegar water, under my sink!

I began to throw the wet cloths, etc, into a small trash can I retrieved from another room, and other miscellaneous items into the bathroom trash. Oh lordy, the vinegar smell was strong! Then I saw one last item that was a pale petal pink color all crumpled up at the back of the cabinet. What could that be? I managed to grab it before nearly falling over. You see, I’m finding in my 7th decade that stooping over too long causes significant balance problems. So as I unfolded my body, I quickly put the pink thingy in my sparkling sink. A double ‘Oh. My. God!!’ The pitiful crumpled fabric was a favored pair of undies! Pale petal pink undies!! Now I’m in the realm of The Twilight Zone! (For all you who may be too young, it was TV at it’s best, with the most twisted views of reality, endings that blew your mind and planted horrific thoughts that gave you nightmares. Just delicious!) 

Back to the underwear. I would never in a million billion trillion years throw undies under my sink! Not ever. Period. Am I losing my grip? I thought. What else have I misplaced that my daughter will find years from now and say, “Poor Mom. She wasn’t herself toward the end.” Nope, nope, not happening. I did not misplace my underwear! So how did it get there? I do not know. But I have noticed of late that my underwear drawer seems to be less overstuffed with underpinnings, so to speak. That’s it! SOMEONE’S BEEN RUMMAGING IN MY DRAWERS! 

But today in the daylight, the mystery deepens: there has not been even one itsy bitsy tiny drip from the bottom of my sink into the cabinet below all day. And believe me, I’ve made a concerted effort to make that happen leaving the faucet wide open, flashlight in hand, searching for telltale signs that the story isn’t over. But nothing, nada, zilch. So I’ll post an update if more undies appear in odd places, but for the time being, I think I’ll blame the incident on an especially close friend of mine who went to the great beyond in 2011. He would have thought this was hilarious. Well, step on back, buddy! Leave my drawers alone! (The urge to keep going with this slightly naughty pun is so irresistible, but I’ll stop for now. Giggle, giggle, giggle…) 

And with that, hold onto your drawers and have a wonderful weekend! 🙂