There may be a bunch of ways to skin a cat but in the end you still have a gristly feline minus a fur coat
I’m back to complaining about the laundry. Yes, I’ve written about my hatred of laundry many times over. And yet there’s always more blood for me to squeeze from that rock (or turnip depending on which phrase you use.) It’s pretty universal, isn’t it? No one likes to do laundry.
This morning, as I was doing an under-the-gun, catch-up load to get my kids through school today, I was struck by how individual the method of doing laundry is. Growing up, my mom did all of the laundry. All of it. Eight people and she worked full-time. Very occasionally, and I’m talking once in a blue moon, I folded clothes with her in the basement.
But she did at least 99.9% of the laundry.
Anyway, seeing the mountain of dirty clothes today — and I am talkin’ a bunch of separate mountains scattered throughout my basement — made me think about my mom’s system of doing laundry.
We had a laundry chute in the bathroom. So we all threw our clothes on the floor of our bedrooms when we were done wearing them and when the piles became too crazy (and we ran out of clean clothes) we threw the clothes down chute. No one had a laundry basket. I truly remember kicking my clothes down the hallway — that’s right, I couldn’t be bothered with carrying clothes — and then jamming them down the chute.
There were times when the chute was full. There was a basket directly under the chute. When you threw clothes down, ideally the clothes whooshed down and landed in the basket. But many times the pile grew and grew and grew until you had a vertical pile of clothes that defied gravity. The clothes actually jammed the chute from the basement up the wall.
I do remember forcefully jamming the clothes in an attempt to get them down there. And I was really put out when I had to go down the stairs and into the basement to clear that pile. Can you imagine? I was there and I still can’t believe it.
Anyway, down there around the basket my mom sorted the clothes into eight or nine piles to be washed. Only once did I ask her to explain the sorting method and I’m still not sure I remember how she did it.
One pile was towels and washcloths. One pile was nylons and underwear (back then everyone’s underwear was white.) One pile was white shirts. One pile was light colored clothes. One pile was medium colored clothes. One pile was dark clothes. One pile was HAND WASH ONLY!
That one blows my mind til this day. Amidst all of that chaos, she actually purchased clothes for us that were hand wash only. Today, when I am buying clothes that’s the first thing I look for on the tag. If that sucker is hand wash only it goes right back on the rack. No. Thank you.
Anyway, once the piles were sorted she washed and dried them. But she had no laundry baskets, remember? So all of the clean clothes were carried in a large bunch in front of her — she tried to make one trip from the dryer — and thrown on an old couch against the wall. She folded socks and underwear and put them in eight piles on the back of the couch. Strangely enough, she went left to right on the back of the couch from youngest kid [me :)] to oldest kid, then her stuff and then my dad’s.
I’m pretty sure I never saw the cushions on that couch. There was always a mound of clothes on the cushions. Now most interesting to me is that she hung everything on hangers except for the piles of socks and underwear.
When a hanger was empty upstairs we put it on the shower curtain rod closest to the spigot. I cannot tell you how many times the curtain would not close because of all of the hangers. Did I clear the hangers? No. I worked around it.
Anyway, sometimes I would bring the hangers down, most of the time my mom did. The hangers were piled on the right side of the couch on the cushions. Then the clothes were put on the hangers and she carried them up the stairs and hung them in the closet.
Ad. Nauseam. Over and over again.
I truly remember sitting on the couch upstairs watching television and seeing her cross the living room repeatedly with scads of clothes on hangers folded over her forearm as she trundled them to the bedrooms. Did I hop up to help her? No. I craned my neck around her to get a better view of the television.
Ugh. If I could go back and change one thing I would have done most of the laundry while she was at work.
Cut to today. I have laundry baskets. Lots of them. I carry them up and down two flights of stairs — although not nearly as often as I should. And I sort in three piles — white, pink and everything else.
Instead of a couch with mounds of clean, unfolded laundry I have overflowing laundry baskets scattered about. The overflowing basket of clean clothes (singular, there’s usually only one basket) sits to the right of the dryer. The lion’s share of clothes sit in multiple baskets to the left and in front of the washer and dryer.
Today, however, the lines have been blurred. I’m pretty sure there’s a clean basket of whites on the extreme right of the dryer. I know I took out a clean load of pink today to free up the dryer. And currently there’s a dark load in the dryer for gym today. But there’s also a basket that looks clean directly in front of the dryer — random pieces have passed the sniff test. There is also a basket of definitely dirty clothes to the right of the dryer.
Those are not supposed to be over there. So everything is mixed up. I’m afraid to fold the questionable clothes and I still don’t want to do any laundry at all.
In the midst of it all my kids sit on the couch watching TV, craning their necks around me. And I climb the stairs from the basement with clean clothes in my arms, like my mom used to.
And the circle of laundry (and life) keeps spinnin’ round.
Tags: Things that mystify me
