Where's a clothespin?

After I inserted a couple of bagel slices into the toaster this morning, I looked for a clothespin to reclose the bag. I hate, with a vengeance, those little white plastic “C” shaped clips that are often used on bagged products. They just aren’t user friendly. The only thing worse for this purpose is the wire clamp used to hold potato bags closed; those are not reusable at all. In our house, potato bags get ripped open, and never again closed up properly. Anyway, I digress. Back to the clothespin.

I needed a spring-type clothespin. We usually have a few in a drawer, along with twist ties, rubber bands and a variety of bags and wraps and such. But today I couldn’t find one. Where in the world, I thought to myself, are the clothespins? I knew that we keep a few in a bag in the laundry room, but I couldn’t find any out there, either. We’ve purchased clothespins in the past, in big packs of 50 or 100. Perhaps some have vanished forever, springing their escape from clothing hung outside to dry on a windy day, but not many. To where do they disappear? Is it like the sock that always seems to show up without its mate at the end of the wash-and-dry cycle? It’s not like a clothespin can cling to the inside of a pant leg with a static charge! Early on a Monday morning, when cranky ol’ me is trying to choke down some breakfast at 5:00, I just didn’t need this annoyance! A twist tie would have to do.

Fast forward to noon. I had lunch at my desk, like I usually do, and ate a few mini carrots instead of potato chips. (I gave up chips a couple of years ago as part of my attempt to eat healthier.) The sandwich was great, and the carrots were fresh out of a new bag. As I was ready to close up the bag, I blindly reached into a drawer in my desk to find…a clothespin! In that couple of nanoseconds, my brain registered, Sure, you don’t have any clothespins when you need them at home because they’re all in a drawer at work!

Hmmmm. This drawer is often bumping into my keyboard, so I don’t usually open it all the way. For some reason, today I pulled it open as far as it would go, and what did I discover but 29 clothespins, buried beneath legal pads and Post-it notes! A veritable goldmine of those little wooden, spring-loaded suckers. In a series of quick calculations that almost prove I must have some degree of OCD, I figured out that the 29 clothespins, along with perhaps 15 twist ties, and a handful of rubber bands, equates to around 50 bags of carrots that I have brought to work for lunches. And, since I very seldom go out to lunch, and since a bag usually lasts me for a couple of weeks, and 100 weeks is about two years, and since I have been eating carrots instead of chips for two years, I have now solved the case of the missing clothespins!

Sometimes it amazes me where an idea for a blog will come from.

Editor’s note (a.k.a. Mrs. S.): If the writer of this blog would look, he might also see that there are at least ½ dozen clothespins in his studio - on nearly empty paint tubes, holding paper to the easel and clipping various papers together. :-)