Friday night on my way home from work, I turned onto our street and soon had to move a bit toward the road's dividing line in order to avoid something that had been thrown onto the side of the road. A little way down, there was another. Then another. I realized it was tee shirts. The odd thing was, they weren't strewn about randomly like if a bag of clothes had been thrown or fallen - each shirt was at almost the exact same distance from the next. It was like someone was driving along with a big pile of clothing beside them and thinking, "That one has a stain [toss]...that one doesn't fit [toss]...my ex-girlfriend gave me that one [toss]...I never liked that one anyway [toss]...that one's ugly [toss]" as they worked their way through an entire wardrobe.

Further down the road there was a pair of jeans and a bath towel, but it was mostly tee shirts. This regular interval of discarded shirts stretched out for at least a quarter of a mile, and then, at the mailbox of the people who live across the street from us, the trail of clothes stopped. When I got home, I told Alan about it and later, when we went out to eat (to the restaurant where I would commit plankery) I drove partway down the road to show him. But wait it gets weirder!

We needed to head in the opposite direction for the restaurant, so I turned around and drove the other way. We got about 1/3 of a mile past our house when what should we see but another tee shirt in the road! Sure enough, the regularly-spaced interval of discarded clothing started up again, and continued all the way to the stop sign at the end of the street (half a mile). Our theory is that someone turned out of our subdivision behind the Shirt Discarder so he had to stop throwing things out. Then the car turned off our street (onto Abbott Road, if you're local) because that's where the cast-off clothing trail picked up again (going all the way to the stop sign at McDaniel Mill, if you're local).

When we went out to run errands yesterday, we saw that all the clothing on the our-house-to-restaurant stretch had been picked up. There's this semi-trashy family that lives at that corner who are always selling something in their yard: watermelons, old lawn mowers, scavenged furniture, junked cars, you name it. We fully expected when we passed their house today to see a clothes rack and a messily lettered sign "T-Shirts $1" out front, but it wasn't there. Actually, the sign would more probably have read "T-Shirt's $1", but I digress. This means one of two things: the mom of the family hasn't washed the shirts in preparation for the yard sale yet, or that the shirts fit some of the eleventy children that live there.

I am wildly curious about the story behind the flung-out clothing. I don't care, particularly - as in, I don't want them forced to come clean up their mess - none of the clothes are in front of our property anyway. I just want to know. Why do you suddenly feel the need to cull your wardrobe one tee shirt at a time while riding down a residential street? Entertain me with your theories as to the cause of this outburst of shirt-flinging!