Washed, Dried, & Waiting to Wear: Why This Woman Sundenly Likes Laundry

Saturday landed me in the laundromat.  It wasn’t an all too terrible experience.  Besides the machines eating coins faster than I could dig them up from under the car seat (and from pockets of old coats and in-between couch cushions), it was nice to have all the laundry washed, dried, and folded in about two hours, give or take an hour since I don’t own a watch.

Usually I am doing laundry every waking minute of my life almost every day.  I know some people pile it all up and save it for a once-a-week marathon, but my washer tends to leak and it would be a full-on flood if I did twenty loads in one day.  Besides one of us is always running out of something, especially FringeMan.  I doubt he has enough work pants and sweatshirts to make it through a week.  So, I wash often, until my dryer died an untimely death and forced me to the laundromat.

I can only hang so many clothes in my house to dry before I get claustrophobic and feel like I’ve been sent to a sudsy purgatory.  Because the weather was cold and dreary, outside was not option.  It’s really never an option since I have nowhere discreet to hang clothes.  I doubt my neighbors want our undergarments waving in their windows.  Know what I mean?  We just don’t have much of a yard.

All those words and I could have just said, Saturday I went to the laundromat.  Why you stick with me, I’ll never understand, but I do appreciate.

So while I’m in the laundromat twiddling my thumbs and keeping my children from using a wayward sock they found as a slingshot to sail quarters through air, I thought how nice it would be to have multiple washers and dryers in my house.  I mean, imagine… not one, but two commercial size loaders whipping the dirt from clothes faster than you fill the hamper…it’s almost as good an idea as hiring a housekeeper.  Ok, not really, but it’s still a good idea.  Too bad Sears doesn’t have a two-for-one sale.

Sears, do hear me?  Your washers and dryers are too expensive!  Can I become a product tester or something?  We have lots of dirty clothes.

After I finished fantasizing about super-capacity red washers, I thought about how lucky I am to have a washer and dryer.  I could be walking to a creek to beat the body odor out of my son’s gym socks.  Praise the good Lord for modern conveniences!

Then I thought that in the olden days people wore their clothes multiple times before washing.  I mean, they must have.  They didn’t have many clothes to rotate.  My mind kept thinking.  I couldn’t stop it.  They only bathed once a week and I doubt they had deodorant.  Good heavens!  They must have stunk like dirty dogs in the rainy season.

I know what my son smells like after gym class and I force him to bathe daily, against his better judgement.  Imagine if we only bathed once a week?  Our furniture would smell like toe jam and armpits.  I have a terrible sense of smell and still, I think I would die of olfactory overload.  No amount of candles can cover week-old rot.

So this morning when I woke up to find the hamper full.  I did not even complain.  I just pushed the pile of clothes down as far as they’d go and determined to buy a bigger hamper.

I’ve decided I like laundry – clean, folded, and waiting to wear.

The end.