I wrote this paper for a class last semester. It seems that my washer and dryer have finally given up their zest for life. Tonight, I may have to break down and buy a new set. I just thought I would post this since I wrote it about my laundry room just a few months ago:
Drop Your Drawers Here
The house is silent at five in the morning. Even the dogs in the yard behind ours have finally stopped barking. I quickly shut off the alarm and spring out of my bed because I love one thing about Monday mornings. The house is dark as I shuffle out my bedroom door and make a quick left to the room just off of the garage. My bare feet are cold against the white tile. Lint and dirt stick to my toes and I wish I had remembered to put on my slippers. The white wooden shelf high up on the wall holds containers of cleaning agents for a myriad of jobs. The blue bottle with orange trigger lid claims to kill “99.9% of bacteria that cause odors”. My favorite product is the gigantic pink bar of soap that simply states it is a “high quality soap.” Grandma Great used the same kind of soap as she rubbed it over the grass stains in my uncle’s work pants. She dipped the pants in the warm, soapy water, scrubbed them with the bar soap, then rinsed them again to remove the stain. She would gently push the pants through the ringers as I stood tall on the empty vegetable crate so I could turn the wooden handle of her old fashioned washing machine.
As I remove the load of damp garments from the washing machine and gently toss them into its counterpart dryer, I am reminded of the day 13 years ago when I bought these machines. They gleamed white in the showroom and the selling point was that they were the largest capacity washer and dryer set available. Up to that point in my life, it had been my most expensive purchase, next to the tuition I had forked over for school that semester. I couldn’t be more excited to replace the scratched and dented, olive colored, stackable set that we had purchased from a garage sale four years prior. The atrocious green set barely held more than a few pair of underwear and a couple of t-shirts at a time. The dryer never worked, so we hung the clothes to dry right there in the wash closet of our little apartment. This set, not so shiny and white as when I bought them, lost their newness years ago. The corners are showing signs of peeling paint and there is a residue of spilled white powder in the liquid dispenser spout. The dryer has a thin coat of lint that needs to be wiped off. I enjoy the “Ching-Chi-Ching” as I trickle a small pile of my tip money that I keep in a clear Pepsi cup on the dryer. I remind myself that I do get paid occasionally to do this job, even if it is only in pocket change retrieved from the bottom of the washer.
I reach for a dryer sheet, the kind that has that “Outdoor Fresh Scent” and toss it onto the load of newly cleaned clothes that I just finished loading into the dryer. As I press the start button, it begins to hum and I reach behind me to grab the first basket to start sorting the mountain of dirty laundry that my family creates in the matter of a week. There is more than three times as much laundry as there was in the day of the green, mini, stackables. Before long, the room has warmed up and the clean scent makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something already today. It is so peaceful in this room, just me and a thousand t-shirts, jeans, and underwear created by my now much larger family. The kids bring their laundry down on Sunday night before they go to bed so I can get an early start this morning. The baskets stack on top of each other like a leaning tower of dirty clothes. I set the baskets just outside the door and start to sort them one at a time. The whites, like socks and underwear, go into the round, green plastic barrel. The darks go into the blue Rubbermaid container, and the towels and sheets into a white laundry basket. I take the time to turn the socks right side out, dumping a pound of sand out of one pink sock, onto the increasingly dirty tile floor. I carefully empty the rest of the socks over my make-shift “ice cream bucket turned garbage can.” As I get the football tube socks flipped the right way, I try to pick out the dry grass that is left there from practice. Holding up the socks, my mind drifts back to yesterday last week when I sat and watched my boys with their teams. It seems like it wasn’t so long ago when my husband first signed up our oldest son for tackle football. I was so set against it, but when I saw him in all his pads, he looked so cute and excited, I didn’t have the heart to tell him he couldn’t play. That was nine years ago and these socks aren’t his, they belong to his two younger brothers.
I turn my attention to the next basket full of baby items that I collected from numerous places around the house. I pull out the pink flannel blanket blanket that I take to church every week, with its pink crochet trim and delicate flowers. I hold it up to my nose. The smell of powder and lotion overtake me as I think of Sunday morning baths with my babies. After they were clean and dry, I would lather them up with the Johnson’s Baby Lotion and wrap them in this blanket. Four baby girls later, it is still a favorite of mine. I toss it into the whites pile and finish sorting.
I turn the dial and it makes a screeching noise as I twist it around to the spot that says Super UltraClean. I pull it out and makes its “plink” sound and comes to life. Warm water streams into the machine and I start packing in the next load. Sometimes its hard to pry the blue lid off of the industrial size bucket of laundry soap that sits on the floor in front of the machine. I fill the plastic green scooper with laundry detergent and replace the lid. The bucket used to serve a dual purpose. I think of when my little girls used to stand on it and “help” me. They would grab whatever their little fingers could hold and toss it up into the washer and exclaim “Mommy, I help you.” Those same little helpers could do their own laundry now, if I could bring myself to letting them.
I gently close the lid on the washer and listen to the basin fill and begin the cycle. I stare at the muddy fingerprints on the door and the floor covered in sand, dry grass, and dirt. I grab the yellow broom that is perched in the corner behind the door and do a quick sweep. I grab a clean rag from the wire basket on the shelf. I wet it from water in the sink and quickly wipe down the door. I remember a rainy summer day that I got so mad at my three boys who found a puddle in the dirt at the park and decided to play in it. They came home soaking wet and brown as mud. I was fuming as I told them to undress right there in the laundry room down to their underwear. All I could think of was the time and energy it would take to get those clothes clean again. “How will we get upstairs to the bathroom if we’re only wearing boxers?” they asked. “I guess you should have thought about that before you made such a mess,” and I stomped into the kitchen. After a few minutes of contemplating their situation, they streaked out of the washroom, into the living room, around the kitchen island and table, hugging me and jumping up and down while they hooped and hollered back through the living room and up the stairs to their bathroom as loudly and obnoxiously as they could. My three boys, hands, arms, and faces covered in mud, streaking through the downstairs of our home in their wet underwear, was a sight I’ll never forget. I never laughed so hard in my whole life. That Christmas they got me a sign to hang in the washroom. The tan paint with black lettering are a stark contrast to the white walls. I stare at it now and remember that day.
Laundry Room
Drop Your Drawers Here
I turn around and stack the empty laundry baskets in a pile and place them on top of the dryer. In a few hours, they will be full again, this time with clean clothes. One load down, who knows how many left to go, I smile, turn around, and shut the door.
The house is silent at five in the morning. Even the dogs in the yard behind ours have finally stopped barking. I quickly shut off the alarm and spring out of my bed because I love one thing about Monday mornings. The house is dark as I shuffle out my bedroom door and make a quick left to the room just off of the garage. My bare feet are cold against the white tile. Lint and dirt stick to my toes and I wish I had remembered to put on my slippers. The white wooden shelf high up on the wall holds containers of cleaning agents for a myriad of jobs. The blue bottle with orange trigger lid claims to kill “99.9% of bacteria that cause odors”. My favorite product is the gigantic pink bar of soap that simply states it is a “high quality soap.” Grandma Great used the same kind of soap as she rubbed it over the grass stains in my uncle’s work pants. She dipped the pants in the warm, soapy water, scrubbed them with the bar soap, then rinsed them again to remove the stain. She would gently push the pants through the ringers as I stood tall on the empty vegetable crate so I could turn the wooden handle of her old fashioned washing machine.
As I remove the load of damp garments from the washing machine and gently toss them into its counterpart dryer, I am reminded of the day 13 years ago when I bought these machines. They gleamed white in the showroom and the selling point was that they were the largest capacity washer and dryer set available. Up to that point in my life, it had been my most expensive purchase, next to the tuition I had forked over for school that semester. I couldn’t be more excited to replace the scratched and dented, olive colored, stackable set that we had purchased from a garage sale four years prior. The atrocious green set barely held more than a few pair of underwear and a couple of t-shirts at a time. The dryer never worked, so we hung the clothes to dry right there in the wash closet of our little apartment. This set, not so shiny and white as when I bought them, lost their newness years ago. The corners are showing signs of peeling paint and there is a residue of spilled white powder in the liquid dispenser spout. The dryer has a thin coat of lint that needs to be wiped off. I enjoy the “Ching-Chi-Ching” as I trickle a small pile of my tip money that I keep in a clear Pepsi cup on the dryer. I remind myself that I do get paid occasionally to do this job, even if it is only in pocket change retrieved from the bottom of the washer.
I reach for a dryer sheet, the kind that has that “Outdoor Fresh Scent” and toss it onto the load of newly cleaned clothes that I just finished loading into the dryer. As I press the start button, it begins to hum and I reach behind me to grab the first basket to start sorting the mountain of dirty laundry that my family creates in the matter of a week. There is more than three times as much laundry as there was in the day of the green, mini, stackables. Before long, the room has warmed up and the clean scent makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something already today. It is so peaceful in this room, just me and a thousand t-shirts, jeans, and underwear created by my now much larger family. The kids bring their laundry down on Sunday night before they go to bed so I can get an early start this morning. The baskets stack on top of each other like a leaning tower of dirty clothes. I set the baskets just outside the door and start to sort them one at a time. The whites, like socks and underwear, go into the round, green plastic barrel. The darks go into the blue Rubbermaid container, and the towels and sheets into a white laundry basket. I take the time to turn the socks right side out, dumping a pound of sand out of one pink sock, onto the increasingly dirty tile floor. I carefully empty the rest of the socks over my make-shift “ice cream bucket turned garbage can.” As I get the football tube socks flipped the right way, I try to pick out the dry grass that is left there from practice. Holding up the socks, my mind drifts back to yesterday last week when I sat and watched my boys with their teams. It seems like it wasn’t so long ago when my husband first signed up our oldest son for tackle football. I was so set against it, but when I saw him in all his pads, he looked so cute and excited, I didn’t have the heart to tell him he couldn’t play. That was nine years ago and these socks aren’t his, they belong to his two younger brothers.
I turn my attention to the next basket full of baby items that I collected from numerous places around the house. I pull out the pink flannel blanket blanket that I take to church every week, with its pink crochet trim and delicate flowers. I hold it up to my nose. The smell of powder and lotion overtake me as I think of Sunday morning baths with my babies. After they were clean and dry, I would lather them up with the Johnson’s Baby Lotion and wrap them in this blanket. Four baby girls later, it is still a favorite of mine. I toss it into the whites pile and finish sorting.
I turn the dial and it makes a screeching noise as I twist it around to the spot that says Super UltraClean. I pull it out and makes its “plink” sound and comes to life. Warm water streams into the machine and I start packing in the next load. Sometimes its hard to pry the blue lid off of the industrial size bucket of laundry soap that sits on the floor in front of the machine. I fill the plastic green scooper with laundry detergent and replace the lid. The bucket used to serve a dual purpose. I think of when my little girls used to stand on it and “help” me. They would grab whatever their little fingers could hold and toss it up into the washer and exclaim “Mommy, I help you.” Those same little helpers could do their own laundry now, if I could bring myself to letting them.
I gently close the lid on the washer and listen to the basin fill and begin the cycle. I stare at the muddy fingerprints on the door and the floor covered in sand, dry grass, and dirt. I grab the yellow broom that is perched in the corner behind the door and do a quick sweep. I grab a clean rag from the wire basket on the shelf. I wet it from water in the sink and quickly wipe down the door. I remember a rainy summer day that I got so mad at my three boys who found a puddle in the dirt at the park and decided to play in it. They came home soaking wet and brown as mud. I was fuming as I told them to undress right there in the laundry room down to their underwear. All I could think of was the time and energy it would take to get those clothes clean again. “How will we get upstairs to the bathroom if we’re only wearing boxers?” they asked. “I guess you should have thought about that before you made such a mess,” and I stomped into the kitchen. After a few minutes of contemplating their situation, they streaked out of the washroom, into the living room, around the kitchen island and table, hugging me and jumping up and down while they hooped and hollered back through the living room and up the stairs to their bathroom as loudly and obnoxiously as they could. My three boys, hands, arms, and faces covered in mud, streaking through the downstairs of our home in their wet underwear, was a sight I’ll never forget. I never laughed so hard in my whole life. That Christmas they got me a sign to hang in the washroom. The tan paint with black lettering are a stark contrast to the white walls. I stare at it now and remember that day.
Laundry Room
Drop Your Drawers Here
I turn around and stack the empty laundry baskets in a pile and place them on top of the dryer. In a few hours, they will be full again, this time with clean clothes. One load down, who knows how many left to go, I smile, turn around, and shut the door.
5 comments:
I must tell you that I LOVE LOVE LOVE my whirlpool duets. The loads are HUGE. I can actually get away with doing only 5 loads of laundry a week!!!
That paper was great!
Nice work - I loved reading!
I loved reading this. Much more than I love doing laundry though. :)
What a heartfelt portrait of your life! I read a book once that talked about taking the time while doing chores to reflect on the blessings that are in our lives because we have people around us who need laundry done, for example. As a fellow laundry lover, I really enjoyed reading that. My laundry day is today, Wednesday, because I like to say, "Wednesday Wash Day".
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