Evening Come

Case of the Missing Panties

Well friends…the blahs have set in full force today. “In the new house?” you ask, incredulous. To which I say, well girls, I can’t find my panties.

I don’t ask for much. A pair of clean Shanny panties: that’s it. Instead, I went rifling through the mass of clothing on our bedroom floor and not a panty in sight. Okay. I lie just a little: there’s a pair that I can’t bring myself to wear: the thong. Why the situation is so unmerciful that I can only find the one, un-wearable pair of panties I own is beyond me.

The thong deserves a back story: in college, I was an R.A. and some gals on my dorm floor bought me a thong because they were positively horrified that I didn’t own one; because they said, with sparkling, know-it-all eyes, “thongs are the best!” But I assure you, they are not the best. The one and only day I wore that thong to work, I was reprimanded for my excessive bathroom breaks, which I took to soothe the unbearable chaffing between my cheeks. For the entire shift, all I could think about was applying cold packs to the area. Furthermore, I implore any of you thong-wearing mamas to understand: I can’t be squatting down to pick up my two year old from the sandbox in the park, and have toddlers shouting, “Look Mommy, it’s a whale’s tail! Right in that lady’s pants!” Anyway, I have kept the whale panties merely as a memento; they've been sleeping like a puppy dog in the dark drawer of my bureau for nearly a decade, and I am not about to wake them for a reunion this morning.

But the whole thing gets worse from here. Because just when I think that going without panties for a day might not be the worst thing, a worser thing happens (I know, worser is not a word; but I have the blahs, so I get a break). So to get an accurate picture of what’s going on, you’ll need to know that before the panty search began, I had just stepped out of the shower, and was wrapped in one of our designated car washing towels (the only towel I could find for drying off). So, mind you, the panty scavenger hunt is all going down while I’m in the nude, draped in the car-washing towel. Suddenly, all in a split second, in the heat of the panty hunt, I lose the grip on my towel. And in that same split second, I spy, through the window (and here it comes, the worser thing than having no panties for a day): my neighbor. That’s right: innocently walking his dog. There we were – my fully clothed neighbor and I, standing face to face -- he having paused to let his dog do some important sniffing work, and me in the nude, revealing my cha chas, my all – the whole enchilada. I can only pray that I was saved by the brim on his cute little sun hat, or perhaps, by some failing eyesight. But because I’m Shanny quick, like a jack-in-box in reverse, I pop down, and squat on the hardwood floor in hiding, in deep horror and humiliation. All of this humiliation is owed to the fact that because we’ve been in the house for only twelve days, we have no window coverings yet. And I already know what you’re thinking: “Shanny, hang a sheet, already.” And I will. But first, let me finish talking about the panty situation.

So panty-less and humiliated, I head down to the garage to rummage through more laundry piles. I rifle through the mounds in the garage – in the dark, with the spider webs, in a skinny aisle between tall stacks of a gazillion boxes. I search and search, and somehow, everybody’s underpants turns up but mine. For a moment, I entertain doing what a friend of mine recently confessed to doing when she moved, and could likewise, not find her panties: she wore her husband’s briefs for a day. Apparently, they were somewhat of a revelation – in that they were exceedingly comfortable. Just when I think I have made peace with the idea of wearing some male underpants, I realize as I’m piling all the clothes I’ve torn out, back in the basket, that the pile I have been digging through is the unclean pile. “Forget it,” I say, and stomp upstairs in my car wash towel. “Can’t a woman get a pair of panties around here?” Albeit, I’m tired today, a bit on the crankster side, but I need my panties.

So, with a full blown case of The Blahs, having surrendered to sipping coffee on the famous blue couch, in my towel, I ponder: is it that our stuff is so all over the place that I had to clear a path for the Comcast man, that's wearing on me; or that he has made seventeen trips to our house trying to get our phone/internet/television service straight? Is it the countless (nightmarish) trips to Home Depot and Ace Hardware that’s killing me? Is it that we have no closets? Is it that nobody in the house can find matching socks? Or is that there is cat litter sticking to the bottom of my bare feet? Is it that I open sixteen cupboards before I find the right one each day? Could it be that I have been using my husband’s sport stick deodorant for twelve days, because, of course, my Dove cucumber stick is nowhere to be found? That I have no time to unpack boxes or say, order up some window shades, because there are baseball games to be watched; granola to be made; because there is dance class, book fair, homework, meal preparation, field trips, and bills? Or … is it ….I ask… the lack o’ panties?

It's all of the above, my friends. It's that moving is crazing wonderful, and crazy awful, all at the same time. So I am left to try a remedy that a dear friend recently shared: I am going to apply chocolate poultices. And then I am going to lay on my new deck, in the sun, while they take effect. And then I'm going panty shopping!