Conundrum #6

I have no idea what number conundrum we are on, but #6 six seemed like a good one for today.

#6  What do you do when your dog drags in six pairs of ladies' underwear?

To put this in context, you should know that the neighborhood garbage gets put out directly across from our house.  So, at any given time there will be five or six plastic bags of trash sitting in the grass waiting to be collected.  For our dear Coconut this is like perusing a 24-hour buffet.  She finds tasty snacks to eat and lots of trash to drag into the house for her entertainment pleasure.  Yesterday, however, her "treasure" of six pairs of underwear left us struggling.

First we wondered if she had stolen them from someone's laundry line.  John reported that they were "nice ones."  However to date she has never expressed an interest in our neighbors' laundry. Our next thought was that she had taken them out of the trash.  Although they were "nice ones," John suggested that our neighbor who just had a baby may have been getting rid of her "fat undies." (I have no idea why John has so much underwear intuition).  More perplexing than the existence of this underwear was figuring our how to deal with it.

If our dog stole someone's underwear, we should return it (that would be the John "we" of course).  If she took them out of the trash, I am simultaneously relieved and disgusted. How exactly do you go door to door asking people (in Vietnamese mind you) whether or not these underwear belong to them?  Humiliating indeed.  While John contemplated this conundrum while standing on the patio next to the offending pile of underthings, our neighbor (who's wife just had the baby) pulled up on his motorbike.  John panicked and did what any good neighbor would do...he tossed the welcome mat on top of the pile and gave our friend a cheery "Xin Chao good neighbor!" before running into the house.

Under cover of darkness, we bagged the underwear in a dark trash bag and returned them to the pile across the street.  Now we just pray that the garbage collectors arrive before Coconut thinks she has died and gone to heaven twice in one week.  If I spot any women going "free-style" in the rice paddy in the next few weeks, I will politely look away and forgive their transgression if they forgive ours.