I think of them now as the laundry equivalent of the Starship Enterprise, off on a quest "to explore strange new worlds... to seek out new life and new civilizations... to boldly go where no one has gone before."

No, I'm NOT talking about thong underwear.

Wash your mind out with soap, right this minute.

What I'm talking about is runaway socks.

You fill a washer with x number of matching socks and when you take the load of laundry out what do you find from time to time? Socks without partners.

Somewhere, between the fill, wash, rinse and spin cycle socks have crept out of your washer and made a dash for freedom.

Two of my daughter's socks did that while she was staying here--clearly urban living wasn't what they wanted and they've decided that the country life is the life for them. I think of them as survivalist socks, hunkered down somewhere in the woods near our home.

Today I decided I'd better go through my underwear drawer and see how many bereft, abandoned socks I own. I'm up to four sad souls left behind by restless mates.

It has been worse.

My underwear drawer is actually in halfways decent shape thanks to last year's trip to Australia. Nothing like contemplating her own mortality to make a woman sort through her unmentionables, eh.

Oh stop looking at me that way. There IS some logic to this.

As my three loyal readers will recall, the spousal unit and I flew halfways across the globe just a few weeks after the Sept. 11 bombing of the World Trade Centre.

Although the airlines and travel agencies were allowing folks to cancel their travel at that time without penalty, we decided that not to fly would be giving in to terror.

But it also seemed wise to have all our affairs in order in case the unthinkable happened. So we sat our daughter down and told her where our wills and vital papers were, gave her a list of contacts, and then looked around at what we needed to do here in case we weren't coming back.

Since I run on pure logic, I immediately cleaned out my underwear drawer.

If I was to croak I did NOT want anyone seeing some of the truly pathetic denizens of said drawer.

Oh be quiet.

You know and I know that way, way in the back of YOUR underwear drawer live tattered unmentionables with elastic waistbands which have lost all elasticity. We are talking underwear which, through great age and innumerable washings have attained a sad, sad shade of gray.

There may be underwear there that has been washed to the point that we're talking about atoms of underwear barely held together by the power of molecular attraction. Yes, these are the underwear that are only donned in state of high emergency, the underwear pulled out when Someone Has Forgotten To Do The Laundry.

And last fall, as I looked around at my home, I decided I could stand the thought that if I died people would be mocking my sad taste in bric-a-brac, making fun of my books and chortling over my truly impaired fashion sense.

But man oh man, I couldn't let them see my pathetic panties.

Priorities. Life is all about priorities.

As you can see, I have mine completely in order.

--Marn