The Time My Mom Said I Was Crazy, But I Wasn't

I've spent the last four months convinced I lost a pair of shoes.  The snowier things got, the sadder I got about my missing shoes because they're warm and have traction  and I've been wearing the same pair of giant black boots (illustrated in my blog about getting to the bus stop) all winter.  I asked my parents if I left the shoes at their place, I cleaned out my car, I worried I left them in Maryland, I came this close to asking the Facebook world if they knew where my shoes were.  Then on Friday I was looking for a pair of sneakers and found my missing shoes, in the shoe box they came in, exactly where they should be.  As a completely sane person, I came up with three scenarios for why I could not find these shoes in November, but could find them in February.

My missing shoes, safe and sound at home.  

1- Theft and return.  Someone, with unknown motives, snuck into my apartment, took my shoes, kept them for four months, and returned them recently.  Perhaps they felt bad.  Maybe they realized the heel is quite stiff and needs to be broken in.  Or they may have grown tired of hearing me clomp around in my boots and wanted me to have a quieter footwear option.  Well-played, sneaky person.  And thanks for the shoes back.
2- Time travel.  Hopefully the ability to travel through time is closer to becoming a reality than I realized.  It this near future, perhaps I travel somewhere without these shoes and realize I need them, so I return for the shoes but two years earlier than I left.  I'm not entirely clear on the rules of time travel, but I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to make contact with past or future versions of yourself, and since these missing shoes didn't really alter the course of my life (because I've got other shoes), it was not worth returning the shoes to the present until the future adventure was over.
3- Mistaken.  It is also possible that I was mistaken when I thought the shoes were missing.  I kind of remember looking in the shoe box in my closet and wondering where I had left them.  I very clearly remember the disappointment of searching my car and finding two empty bags of Jalapeno Cheetos, a frozen water bottle of Gatorade, and no hiking shoes.  But then again, my memory isn't all that great, I might have made up the missing shoe feeling and clung to the disappointment.  It's happened before.

Now you may say, it's quite obvious, given your poor memory, that Scenario 3 is what happened.  And I'm willing to believe it.  However, I don't know enough about time travel advances to completely write that one off, and I've got a story that makes Scenario 1 seem reasonable.  I call this story "The Time My Mom Said I Was Crazy, But I Wasn't."  Several years ago, when I was still living with my parents, I started noticing weird things were happening with my laundry, particularly the underwear portion of my laundry (stick with me, this story isn't all that scandalous).

• First, I noticed my favorite pair of underwear was missing.  At that point in my life I was buying a lot from Victoria's Secret (constantly mailing those catalogs was an effective strategy), so when I told my mom about this she said "How can you even know that, you've got so many clothes I can't believe you've got a favorite."  I tried to put the whole ordeal out of my mind, but I was really sad about this missing pair of underwear, because they were super cute.  
• A few weeks later, while doing laundry, I found a pile of my underwear stuffed behind some hampers in the laundry room.  I thought this was weird, because I'm more careful with my laundry (after years of living with siblings who steal laundry when it's in the drier (not underwear though)), plus it was just a bunch of underwear and I sort my clothes by color, not type.  Anyways, there were enough options, usually based on clothes falling out of laundry baskets, that I dropped it.  
• A week or so after that, I found a whole fistful of my underwear hidden behind the toilet in the bathroom connected to my bedroom.  This was just too much.  Why would that happen?  So again, I told my mom, because I was just flummoxed.  This conversation will be used for all of eternity when I'm trying to remind my mom of those times she traumatized me:
• (me) Mom, I found a bunch of my dirty underwear shoved behind the toilet in the basement bathroom.  Can you think of any reason that would happen?  I'm kind of freaked out by it.  And remember that time I couldn't find my favorite underwear?  Or my new swim suit?  Maybe something creepy is happening downstairs.  
• (mom)  Becka, don't worry.  You were probably just in one of your weird moods and put them there.
• (me) What kind of weird moods do you think I have?  I've never been in the mood to hide my underwear behind the toilet!
• (mom) I don't know, but I think you're kind of strange.  
• To be fair to my mom, I think most of this conversation was driven by her incredible optimism (she really does look at the bright side of things, rather than the creepy-underwear-thief side of things) and the fact that Ambien had recently become popular and there were lots of stories about people doing odd things (but I was not taking Ambien).  
• A month after that conversation, my mom called me while to tell me I was right, someone had stolen and hidden my underwear!  Turns out there was a person in our neighborhood who had entered several young women's bedrooms while visiting other people in their house, and stolen their underwear.  When they were discovered, there was too much underwear to return it to the owners, so it was just thrown away (which is was really sad, because in that pile was a brand new swimsuit that had never been warm).   While this was unusual, and alarming, I felt vindicated   I wasn't crazy, something weird was happening in the basement.  

Then I moved to Logan, I've continued to lose things, mostly close-toed shoes.  However, none of the things I've lost has ever come back, until these shoes came back.  So, if you've been sneaking in my house to take stuff from my closet, only to return it to the place it goes, please stop.  It makes me paranoid, and a little scared.

Also, I love you mom, I hope you don't actually think I' terribly strange.