"Laundry"

                                                                   Sydney M. Williams 

Essay from Essex

“Laundry”

April 4, 2021

 

“Maybe a good rule in life is never become too important to do your own laundry.”

                                                                                                                                Barry Sanders (1968-)

                                                                                                                                Former running back, Detroit Lions

 

During my first seventy-five years, I never thought about what happened to dirty clothes tossed on the floor. I just knew they would reappear in a few days, cleaned, folded and placed in a bureau drawer. When in boarding school, dirty laundry was mailed home, a foul-smelling gift to my mother. In college and in the army, memories of doing laundry have disappeared. Perhaps I never changed my clothes? Or perhaps that nightmare about a laundromat was not a dream? 

 

Things changed when we moved to Essex Meadows. Caroline was recovering from a fractured pelvis incurred six months earlier. And I had retired from a job as a stockbroker in New York. Our laundry equipment, now a stacked washer-dryer, was stuffed into a former closet that is filled with paper towels, toilet paper, toolboxes, cleaning fluids, soap, napkins, extra food (cookies, especially), a shredder and a spare vacuum cleaner. There might even be a grandchild left behind from a pre-pandemic visit. But I suspect not. I think we would have heard from her or him.

 

At any rate, given our changed circumstances, I volunteered to be washer-person. Through trial and error, I mastered the complexities of how much and when to add detergents. I learned the drying cycle and, with my wife’s verbal assistance, came to know which clothes should be dried on a line strung between two cabinets. Now healthy as a horse and with a beatific smile on her innocent face, she has domesticated me in other matters. I was disabused of the notion that meals arrive on the table without preparation and that cleaning up afterwards was performed by mysterious, ghost-like creatures. Army basic training had taught me to make my bed, but in years of rising before the sun that talent had been lost and had to be re-learned.

 

“We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy,” wrote E.B. White, “even if it is only picking grapes or sorting laundry.” Joy is not the emotion I feel when I dump the still-warm, dried clothes on the bed, preparatory to sorting. It is satisfaction of a job well done, and I like the feel and the smell. The poet and author, Kathleen Norris has written that doing laundry, like taking a walk by oneself, is a good time for contemplation. I agree. The job is mechanical, requiring little thought, leaving room for ideas to bounce around in what is left of my brain. When poaching an egg or tucking in a disobedient bed sheet, attention must be paid, but sorting laundry can be done on autopilot. Tee shirts belong with tee shirts and boxer shorts with boxer shorts. My inner Walter Mitty has my mind wander, sometimes in creative directions.

 

For one who anthropomorphizes all living things, from toads to skunk cabbage, who believes fairies lurk under leaves and who makes book on which ice cube will be the last to disappear down the drain, it was easy to once marvel at how dirty clothes could become clean without effort. The last five years have taught me to appreciate the effort it takes, and to better understand the job my wife once performed and which my daughter and daughters-in-law now do, along with millions of other women.