Dear Laundry,

I have loved you as long as I can remember.

Well, I’ve loved the washing and drying and the sorting prior to washing.

I have never loved the putting away.

When Ant and I got married, I was so excited to sit on the couch and fold laundry while watching a movie or a TV show.

At Number Five on Finley Street in Auburn, our precious less than 400-square foot apartment, there was one washer and dryer between the nine units. Our heating shared the heater with the laundry room, so our heat was discounted.

Then for three-ish years in the first Meadow Vista house, we became laundromat people and saving all quarters became a battle I never thought we’d win.

For awhile it was a random evening mid-week or Friday nights, and then eventually we started loading up the laundry baskets into my car on Saturday mornings and arrive at Thrifty’s within 15 minutes of it opening. During one of the month of Mays, we transitioned to doing laundry on Saturday evenings, where I met Cheryl and her husband Jesse. I saw them at Safeway last January and they remembered me.

We learned to fold laundry at the laundromat. However, a lot of the times, the folded clothes would sit in the baskets  by the closet for the entire week and never get put away. And because it was warm, the cats would climb in the basket and sleep on it. I got into the habit of putting a towel over the basket so that not everything would get cat hair on it.

While Edward was living with my parents while we were in Rocklin, he climbed into our basket of clean laundry at their house while we were visiting and I knew he remembered us.

When we moved to Rocklin, the apartment complex had laundry rooms on-site. Again, we learned to do laundry early on Saturday mornings to avoid the Saturday day and Sunday laundry rush.

My favorite thing we learned about laundry while living in the apartment: Ant was hired as a drafter at an architecture firm. He started wearing dress pants and collared shirts, so he started putting laundry away when it came out of the dryer.

And the habit carried over to when we moved to The Hobbit Hole two Decembers ago. We put each load away as we it comes out of the dryer. (90% of the time.) We hang most of our clothes, so it makes more since for us to just take the basket into the closet and hang them up. Instead of folding them in the living room and then hanging them up in the closest.

I look forward to the day when Ant and I have our own laundry room. A few years ago, during the first Meadow Vista house, we went to Best Buy for funsies and walked all around looking at the appliances. I had Ant take a picture of me with a washer and dryer. One of my favorite memories by far.

I hope our laundry journey helps me appreciate our eventual own washer and dryer. I hope we always remember our laundry journey.

 

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This is Day 2 of 40 from Callie Feyen’s “40 Days of Writing the Everyday.” Read Day 1 here.

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Writing Process Notes:

3-3-20

// 8:54pm for 25 minutes. 436 words. Pink rocking chair while Ant and his brother played Smash Bros. Written and posted after a 9.5-hour work day #realjobcoach, last-minute Primaries Voting, and dinner.

// 23 mins for editing, adding notes, taking/emailing/saving/adding photo to post, looking for other cat-laundry photos, adding links. Total Word Cunt: 593.