New Socks

and their old-fashioned hangers

Nov 13, 2025

0:00

-3:57

Even though time has shifted back an hour, it is still too dark in the morning to see. Mid-autumn air cools the bare floors. My feet are the first to learn the difference between October and November.

I turn on the closet light, ruffle through the sock drawer. The sight is sad indeed. Dismal yarns haphazardly positioned. Worn out toes, dirty insteps; dog-hair threaded into the soles. Sad solitaires, unpaired. ‘Where did your mate go?’ I ask the gray, athletic one. No answer. This singleton is utterly demoralized.

I shut the drawer, and put on my slippers. There’s no denying the current reality: the state of my sock union is not strong.

No matter!

I have a credit card and an internet connection. There’s no modern problem I can’t solve with these tools. Five minutes later, twelve new pairs of socks are on their way to my house in the woods.

Delivery Day

There’s no doubt the socks are arriving soon. I know this for certain because my phone can’t keep a secret. It tells me there will be a package today, who sent it, and what is inside.

I remind myself never to tell my phone anything I wouldn’t want everyone to know within a matter of hours.

In the afternoon, the socks arrive. I unwrap the envelope and find them in their see-through sleeping bags, resting on individual little hangers. These plastic sock hangers were useful once, when people went to department stores and perused multiple sock options hanging on the wall. This is back when there was a considerable preference for touching clothes before buying them.

I release the socks from their sleeping bags, and consider the hangers again. At first, I am annoyed that I’ll need to remove each pair of socks from their hanger. But then I feel my mother in the room with me.

The death of someone you love leaves you alone with only what you’re able to remember about them. At first, their absence is so raw, each recollection feels like lemon juice on an open wound. The grandest moments flood first: birthdays, celebrations, anniversaries. Then time moves you forward, and it’s the smallest, most random of acts that come, and at the most unexpected times.

I unwrap the socks, cut off the tags, attached by those little white plastic needles that have certainly suffocated more than one small house pet after they find them on the floor. I carefully remove the sock hanger. Look at it. Twist the short end behind the long end. And within a few short minutes, I’m looking at a murder of treble clefs adorning the pile of new socks.

My mother used to do this—mold the sock hangers into treble clefs. She couldn’t help herself. And now, neither can I.