My wife believes in the old axiom "a place for everything and everything in its place."

I, too, subscribe to this principle. However, her place for everything and my place for everything aren't always the same.

For example, she thinks the place for dirty socks and used towels is in the hamper. I, on the other hand, think the place for those items is on the bathroom floor.

She feels — rather strongly I might add — that the place for shoes is in the closet, neatly arranged side by side in these shoe arranger things. I think the place for shoes is wherever you last took them off.

This difference of opinion regarding where to leave things is one of the main items that separate the mindsets of men and women.

I don't really leave dirty socks and wet towels on the bathroom floor and I almost always put my shoes back in the closet. There are other occasions, however, when I generally leave things in places where I know they will be when I need them and go back to get them later. The trouble is, as I have previously stated, my wife does not seem to think that the places I leave them are the "correct" places for said items.

So she moves them. She puts them where SHE thinks they should go.

This is very annoying.

The older I get, the more trouble I have remembering things. You can see then how it would be really troubling on those rare occasions when I actually remember where I left something and when I go back to get it, I discover that it's been moved by my lovely wife. Then I become really confused and disoriented, like when I'm really sleepy in the morning and put my underwear on backwards. I don't know if I really remembered where I left the item I'm looking for, or if she moved it, or if I'm going insane, or if I even had it in the first place, or some other mind-boggling possibility.

In talking with other men, I've discovered that this propensity women have to move things is not a trait exclusive to my wife. And I'll bet that down through the ages it has been happening a lot more than we know about. I'll bet that man would have invented fire a lot sooner except that once he got the first fire started and went running to find his buddies to show them what he had done, by the time he got back to the cave, his wife had moved it.

"Honey," he would ask, trying not to lose his temper, "where is that fire I started a few minutes ago?" He would point to the dirt floor in the middle of the cave. "I left it right here," he would say.

"Oh, you mean that pile of sticks with the red and orange things coming out of them?" the cave wife would answer.

"Duh, yeah," the caveman would respond (by the way, this would have been the first-ever documented instance of the sarcastic use of the word "duh").

"Oh," the cave wife would say, "I threw that out. It was cluttering up the place. You know, you really shouldn't leave your things lying around like that. If you want to keep them, you should put them away."

The caveman would sigh deeply. "By 'outside'," he would say, "do you mean ..."

"Yes," the cave wife would cut him off in mid-sentence, "I meant outside, as in out of the cave door, as in out of here, as in out in the yard."

The caveman's friends would glance at each other, their eyes darting from side to side, wondering how their buddy is possibly able to maintain his composure in light of this disturbing development.

"But," the caveman would say with gritted teeth, "it's raining outside!"

"Yeah," the cave wife would respond flippantly, "so?"

Then I'll bet the exasperated caveman went outside, gathered up his extinguished and charred sticks and tossed them over a cliff. So disgusted was he that he and his descendants, to whom the story was passed down, didn't try to create fire again for several thousand years.

That's a whole lot of raw dino-steaks, y'all.

My wife will say this is all baloney — that women don't intentionally move things that belong to their husbands just to annoy them.

However, there is documented scientific proof regarding this phenomenon. Many, many studies have been done and I've got copies of them right here.

Now let's see, where are those copies? I saw them just a minute ago.

REALLY, they were right here where I left them ...

Klonie Jordan (editor@gaffneyledger.com) is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger.