The Case of the Missing Sweat Pants

It had become a tradition to spend Easter at Estes Park, Colorado. Every year we would drive to Estes and spend three days of
fun.  Dying eggs, playing board games, jumping into the hot tub (sometimes when it was snowing!), skating, popping popcorn, wandering through shops and baking cookies kept us busy the whole weekend. One morning my son asked, "Has anybody seen my sweat pants?" No body had.

Both children were questioned and both told us they had not seen the missing sweats.


"When did you have them last?" He remembered going to the hot tub but he was sure he had brought them back. The whole group went out to look in, and around, the hot tub. Nothing.

"Could you have left them in the truck?" He didn't think so, but he went out to look.  I watched from the window as everybody trekked out to the truck and I could see them searching in, out and underneath seats. My grandson got on his hands and knees and looked under the truck. They returned to the room empty handed.

"Are you sure you checked your room thoroughly?" He said he had checked it twice. He even took everything out of the suitcase, looked in the closet and under the bed.

"Could you have dropped those sweats on the way to the hot tub?" He decided to go to the office to check, because maybe, just maybe, they fell along the way and someone picked them up and took them to the office. No sweats had been turned in.

All evening he kept saying, "Where could those sweats have gone?"
I said, "It sure is a mystery, things don't just disappear."



On Monday, as we packed to return home, my grandson exclaimed, "Look what I found!" He handed the sweats over to his father with a grin,  "Got you! This is pay back for all the tricks you play on me!" How he managed to keep a straight face as he helped search for the sweats surprised me. It also amazed me that he could keep the secret for two whole days. My son thought it was a great joke but he did give his son a warning, "Be on the look out, it's my turn to get you next!"

The missing sweats spurred my imagination and I wrote a short story about an elk who did not like the cold  but when he found some sweats near a hot tub he put them on and they worked great in keeping his legs warm!

"I may have fur,

but I'm still cold,

Brrr, Brrr,"

said the elk.

wearing sweat pants!

E. Moscoso