Tony and I have poured a lot of time, energy and money into establishing a home for ourselves in Michigan. After bopping around the country every summer, crashing with my parents or friends, we finally have a place of our own. When we head back to India every year, we winterize the house and leave it in the hands of a trusted neighbor. Still, we can’t help but worry.

When we returned to the States June 1, we opened up our house with a big sense of relief. Everything looked fine … for a few minutes. After throwing a load of laundry in the dryer, I smelled something funny. I turned off the dryer and checked the lint trap. It was clean. I had read about the danger of letting lint build up in the exterior vent, so I went outside to check it. The vent was bursting with dry, fluffy lint!

Years of watching Monk, Psych and The Mentalist prepared me for this moment. Somebody must have broken in to our house to do laundry! And they must have done it in the last day or so or the lint would have been wet from the rain, I deduced. As I was rubbing my chin reflectively, Tony came upstairs from our basement.

“Did you put the yellow kayak somewhere?” he asked.
“No, where would I put it?”
“Well, it’s not there,” he said.
“Someone broke into our house to do laundry and stole our kayak!” I exclaimed.

Paranoia gripped up both. We searched every inch of the house to find any more evidence of a prowler in freshly laundered clothes. In the guest bedroom, I stared at the dresser. “Where’s that green box and the fake fern that usually goes here?” I asked. I use the box for jewelry during the summer, but I didn’t leave any jewelry in it. I guess it did have some loose change in one of the drawers. We panicked.

“Why would anyone steal that box but not take our TV?” Tony asked.
“Well, it is a crappy old TV,” I said. “Who would want it?”

We asked the neighbors if they had seen anyone in our house in the days before our arrival. They hadn’t. We asked my sister, who lives about half an hour away, if she had sneaked in to do a few loads of laundry. Nope.

I called my dad to see if he had any ideas. He reminded me that the family who gave us the yellow kayak borrowed it back for a camping trip or something. As soon as he said that, I recalled the email correspondence. Then I got on the phone with my mom, who said the dryer probably just sucked all the lint in the hose out to the exterior vent when I turned it on for the first time in 10 months. OK, that explains the kayak and the dryer lint … but what about my fake fern and the green box?

Stumped, Tony and I quietly explored the house again. This time, I noticed a beach towel draped over the clothes hamper. When I pulled away the towel, I discovered the missing fern and box. I had obviously covered them to keep off the dust. Mystery solved.

After a couple days, our paranoia abated and we settled in to Michigan life again. God only knows what’s going on at our house in Delhi …