My 10-year-old son has a nasty habit of leaving his dirty socks lying around the house. My personal favorite location for the discarded socks is the dining room table.  Really?  One of your nastiest articles of clothing sitting where you eat.  Really?  At least, he consistently leaves them at his place at the table.  A sort of filth control measure.  Any who, we returned this afternoon from his baseball doubleheader and I began the laborious process of emptying the car.  Food remains, stadium chairs, random jackets, all of them understandably abandoned in the car waiting for a kind and benevolent parent to move them to their proper place or perhaps the “Car Cleaning Fairy” just takes care of it.  Just a thought.

There I was cleaning the car and what did I find in the third row of seats, where my 10-year-old nests for his family voyages? His dirty baseball cleats and tucked inside his filthy red socks.  Kind of cute, in that his team is the Red Sox, but other than that, not cute.  Nasty.  Not only were they balled up, inside out, but upon unraveling, my hands were covered with a fine layer of infield dirt and a musk that his cleats had been fermenting all Summer.  Even the most astute biologist would have been startled by how the filth from the socks seemed to leap from their original host onto my awaiting hands.  Disgusted, I threw the socks into the laundry room (the backyard campfire pit was my second choice) and headed toward the bathroom to wash my hands.  Ah, the long baseball season has ended, but its scent, courtesy of waywardly discarded socks, still lingers on.