Laundry

I used to hate doing laundry. After I moved out on my own, and was living hand to mouth, I would bring my laundry with me when I visited my parents. My mother would do my laundry and I'd save the cost of using a laundromat. It seemed like a good deal. After she died, I became acquainted with the laundromat 6 blocks away (our building was too small for a laundry room). I hated schlepping over there with my cart, there on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Winter was especially rough, with the snow and ice and cold. I had only so many days I could get over there and the weather to contend with.

And I always counted my blessings that the day the rat had died behind the machines was a nice spring day, when we could all hang out outside waiting between cycles so we could avoid breathing in the stench. It was a weekend and the machine repair people couldn't come til Monday to move the machines so someone could get to the decaying body. I would've left, but even with having bought enough undies for a month, I was about to run out of clean ones.

When I got married, I gained a laundry room in the basement of the apartment building where hubby and I live. In the beginning, I'd sit down there while the machines cleaned and dried my clothes, but I quickly decided it made more sense to keep going up and down, so I could dust and do other chores while the loads ran and I would go down after a half hour to move wet clothes from washer to dryer, then back down in another 30 minutes to fetch them. And so that's what I did for the next 16 or so years. And I spent more time waiting for our slow elevators than doing anything else, it seemed.

So for the past few years, I've been going down there and staying while the loads run. I bring a book, a bottle of water, and maybe a snack. I get comfy on one of the metal folding chairs and settle in with my book and the time flies by and I get a bit caught up on my reading. The chance to just relax while the machines do their thing has made laundry my favorite domestic chore.

Feeling:

laundry