I always check pockets before doing a load of laundry. I’ve washed far too many tissues and even one diaper that destroyed my last machine to risk it. (R.I.P. Sudsy.)

I don’t however check the kids clothes because few are made with pockets anymore, based on the Fast Food Restaurant uniforms that prevent teenagers from stealing cash or French fries. This way, the kids are an open book and can’t run into the house with any hidden treasures, they have to get past the candy detector first.

I pulled a load of laundry out of the washing machine this morning and found a wrapper. Of course I can’t assign the wrapper to any individual in the house because the DNA had been washed clean off of it and the only prints for me to dust for were mine.

The wrapper is brown, about 1”x1” in size and has stamped pictures of what appears to be a root-beer float with the word “SODA” repeated across the bottom though, this could be code for something.

I’m not suggesting I’m the kind of parent who would become enraged that my child opted to eat candy at school rather than her red pepper sticks (sliced with love and sealed with a kiss) but I do get upset when my child returns home with a full lunch bag and claims she just wasn’t hungry when clearly she was plied with candy in exchange for dodge-ball favours.

But maybe the wrapper belonged to Greg. He does have a sweet tooth and despises my disappointed look when he pulls a candy wrapper from his pocket which, if he’s thinking, he would have buried the evidence before it made its way into the washing machine knowing I was the only one of the five of us who knows (conveniently) how anything in the laundry room works.

Is it even a candy wrapper at all? What if it’s one of those novelty erasers or scratch ‘n sniff stickers? Or what if it’s drugs? What if this new way of distributing pills, sealed in root-beer float packets is meant to fool authorities into thinking it’s candy? Maybe this wrapper is a cry for help and somebody in this house is leaving clues for me to find so we can get cracking on the intervention.

I tried scrambling the letters of SODA like a jumble hoping that might tell me something and came up with OSAD: Ontario Substance Abuse Detection.

It’s worse than I thought.