Typically, I do laundry on the weekends. It is not my favorite activity, but I know that if I do not want my children to look like orphans, it must be done. So I do the laundry.
The process of collecting the laundry is one of the more labor intensive parts of the job. Maybe in some households collecting the laundry would simply mean locating a few hampers and consolidating. Here, we apparently have a looser definition of a hamper, and by loose I mean non-existent. My husband and I have a hamper in the corner of the bathroom, and when I go to empty it for the purpose of doing the laundry, I find about 4 articles in it-- all of which are my underwear. I am disciplined about the underwear, generally speaking, because if left unattended, it is likely to become an unfortunate victim of the dogs. And a girl only needs so many pairs of crotch-less undies. But I digress- we’ll leave that phenomenon for another day.
The point is my husband and I, who are otherwise fine upstanding citizens, are incapable of depositing laundry in a proper receptacle. We each have respective favorite spots to deposit our clothes- for example, he favors his side of the bed. As I do not have much occasion to venture to his side (“his side” perhaps sounds forbidden and mysterious, but really, it’s only a space of a few feet between the edge of the bed and the wall), I am always in awe of the veritable cornucopia of black socks that has built up there in the last week. Also, many white t-shirts are known to gather there. I am arguably less consistent, but tend to favor corners. Noting this habit, I devised a plan to defeat my inner slob by putting a hamper in one of my favored corners. Interestingly, the hamper-containing corner instantly becomes less attractive to me and I switch to another corner.
While we clearly maintain our own laundry habitats, we also have one location where our dirty laundry mingles together- I know, romantic. It’s a chair in our bedroom, and it’s where anything we don’t want to get too wrinkled gets put- we don’t want the nice stuff slumming with the black socks or the undies. This behavior is undoubtedly motivated by the fear that one morning we will be running late and not have anything to wear and we might be able to salvage something from the chair- provided it passes the sniff test, of course. We’re not totally barbaric. The chair operates a little like the rings in the trunk of a tree- layers near the top are newer younger layers while those close to the bottom are, well, old wood and best avoided.
My husband, apparently appreciative of the fact that the chair is no longer a great place to maintain a shirt a dress shirt that could be legitimately worn again without washing or ironing, has begun draping his shirts over almost any flat surface in the house. Chairs, the back of the couch, over the edge of the bath tub- anywhere he perceives as safe from kids and dogs. Understanding what he intends for the shirt is sometimes difficult. Does he want it washed? Is it in cue to be worn this week? I study the placement of each article, trying to decide what he intends for it, like a farmer studying crop circles. Sometimes I scoop a shirt or pair of pants from their respective perch only to be later rebuked, “Did you wash my pants again?? I was going to wear them tomorrow.” As if I wash things with unnecessary frequency (uh, no) and as if washing something precludes it from being worn the following day.
If you’ll excuse me, I think the dryer just buzzed.
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