Laundry...Again

The dirty laundry -7/31/2011

I think I told you a couple of days ago that I’m still inundated with laundry from our month of camping/vacation/playing before school starts. It’s SOO frustrating! I can’t seem to make any real progress on the unending pile. It didn’t help that Prima Donna and Sport both cleaned their rooms last Thursday.

The clean laundry-7/31/2011

I’ve been complaining about the lack of bath towels in my bathroom for a couple of weeks. After she hauled two baskets of laundry to the mudroom, the Prima Donna stopped by to chat. “You know how we haven’t been able to find any towels lately?” she suggested. I sprinkled the soap and closed the lid to the washer for the sixth time that day. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Well, I found 23 of them in my room!” She dumped them in my to-do pile. “I hope you took all of your clothes down to the kids’ laundry room!” I responded. I tried pushing the pile of towels into a smaller pile, one that didn’t cover half the mudroom floor. “I did!” she answered cheerfully as she headed back to her room.


Sometimes I think laundry is the story of my life. It doesn’t matter how much I do, it ALWAYS comes back again. Even if by some miracle I did get to the bottom of the pile, as soon as the kids undressed for the night I would have a couple of loads to do all over again. It hasn’t always been that way…I could have avoided laundry for most of my life except… Wait, let me back up a bit and I will tell you the whole story.

Picture credit

I’ve told you before that my mom was very frugal. Raising 8 kids on a teacher’s salary couldn’t have been easy. She pinched pennies everywhere she could, including laundry. I watched her perform this ritual many times. The washing machine was in our kitchen and the dryer was in the basement, but Mom rarely used the dryer. She put the clothes and the soap in the washer. When they were finished sloshing around, she stopped the washer and pulled the wet items out one by one, hand-wringing each piece and placing it in a bucket.

Me and Sweetie- Engagement picture

Then she added more clothes and turned the washer back to begin the cycle again. Since there was still water in the machine, she simply added more soap and it was off and running. She completed three washings in the same water, then transferred the clothes back in to spin. Then she took all the wet clothes and usually hung them outside on the clothesline if we had nice weather. If the weather was bad, she hung some things in the bathroom and some downstairs on the clothesline in the furnace room. She did laundry pretty much every day, and it forced her to stay near the washing machine all the time.

Needless to say, when I got married, I was terrified of doing laundry! I was in college at the time, so of course I had to go to class. I couldn’t be sitting around all day watching the washer. Besides, the laundry room was several buildings away… It was a dilemma. But my sweetie jumped in and offered to be in charge of the laundry. He had been away to college on his own, so he knew how to wash his own clothes. I was so grateful!

In front of our first apartment

For almost a year, he faithfully executed his duties by taking care of all the laundry (at least the washing and drying part, I still got to fold it). I spent some time with him, just watching, because it didn’t seem like he was doing it the same way that Mom had. We didn’t even own a bucket! After a while I realized that there was definitely an easier way. Then one night when he had a late lab, I decided I could finally run a load on my own. I wanted to wear something that he hadn’t gotten around to washing yet. That was one of the dumbest mistakes I ever made. The chore that I had avoided for nearly a year suddenly became mostly my responsibility. Over the years I’ve done thousands of loads of laundry…but I still let him scrub the shower.