Or: how I came to wear Tim's underwear

Our apartment building doesn't have balconies like a lot of Cairo apartments, just a laundry line outside our kitchen windows. This summer I've enjoyed feeling old-school domestic hanging out my freshly-laundered clothing.

But, inevitably, your hands slip with clothespin and article of clothing in hand. Tim has the butter fingers in this family, and was known on more than one occasion to drop things. Mostly, my things. Mostly my.... personal things. Like my sports bra. And my geez.

But fortunately (or unfortunately), we have a neighbor below us with a laundry line that is so generous as to catch our dropped items. But considering the dropped items, it made for an awkward visit. Because, honestly, our neighbor was a lone, elderly Muslim man with a walker. And I'm pretty sure knocking on the door and asking for my unmentionables is haram.

Then one night, Tim dropped my swimsuit bottoms. My teeny little panty-mimicking swimsuit bottoms. We did not want to wake Mr. Elderly-Lives-Below-Neighbor so we waited until the next day to knock and ask for them back. We knocked, and we asked, and Mr. Elderly-Lives-Below-Neighbor confessed he had no idea where they went. We searched the ground below and they were nowhere to be found. Which means a) Mr. Elderly-Lives-Below-Neighbor has a fetish, or b) his maid stole them to wear for her husband (because no Egyptian women swim, especially in teeny swimsuit bottoms).

And since I did not want to spend the money to buy a new swimsuit in Egypt (do they even sell them??), I have settled for wearing Tim's tighty-whities underneath my board shorts. It feels slightly mischievous and more than a little odd.