Laundry

When I was a teenager living at home, laundry was a constant job. The washer ran every day, and we often folded a pile of clean clothes after supper.

I found this never-ending laundry annoying, so when I moved to my own house, I did laundry every Monday and Thursday. I tried very hard to wash, dry, fold, and put away every piece on the designated day. This left me five days a week to think about something besides laundry. Bliss.

Recently I suggested this method to a friend as a good housekeeping tip, under the illusion that this is still how I operate. It is true that I have graduated to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as my laundry days because our family has grown, but I still stick to a schedule. Laundry has not completely taken over my life.

Or has it?

Let me tell you how the laundry has gone this week. With seven people in the house (several of them being teenagers who shower with alarming frequency), the laundry piles on Monday morning are staggering. Twelve or thirteen loads is not rare. This week was no exception. If each load takes fifty minutes to wash, and we shove the next load in immediately, we are looking at between ten and eleven hours of washer time. One or two bouts of forgetfulness by the load hanger-outer, and we end up with a lo-ong day indeed. I have more or less turned the job over to one of the girls for the summer, so she labored away at hanging up towels and socks in her neat and organized way. At some point in the late afternoon, we emptied the full line and she hung out a couple more loads.

The last loads weren’t weren’t dry by the time we were ready to call it a day, so we waited to deal with them till Tuesday morning.

Wednesday was laundry day again, happily a little smaller one. We tried to keep the washer running, but we had to be gone for a couple of hours in the morning and the rest of the day was a busy one. We did have things under control by supper time, except for a couple of loads of little pj’s and t shirts that spent the night on the line. After supper, one of the girls threw the grimy kitchen rug into the washer.

On Thursday, we were gone a lot of the day, but when we got home in the afternoon, we brought in the bit of laundry on the line, and I hung up the kitchen rug. Against my better judgment, I put freshly potty trained Quinn down for a nap with no diaper and paid for it with two loads of bedding to wash.

Today is laundry day again, and I see that we are indeed fussing with laundry every single day, just like we did when I was a teenager. My methods might be slightly different, but many bodies in a house create many loads of laundry, and provide endless entertainment for the little washer women.

Perhaps some day I will learn that just because something works in one stage doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work in another, and just because it works for me doesn’t mean it will work for my neighbor.

And laundry will be there for me when everyone else has forsaken me, the way it looks.

Does laundry dictate your life, or have you discovered a way to be The Boss?