Once, a long time ago, I read a piece in a magazine about a commune. It must have been an interesting article, but for some reason the only information I retained concerned the way the commune managed their laundry. No, not “dirty laundry”, although it turned out there was plenty of that, I am talking clean here, fresh out of what I assume were industrial machines.
Their method? Wash the clothes and then dump them in a big pile on the floor of a special room. As the commune members got up in the morning they would go and choose themselves clothes from the community pile. So if you were a late riser you probably got the nasty old or uncool clothes, I don’t know. Anyhow, very clever method of dealing with laundry.
In our house I am experimenting with a similar system, except our clothes are semi-sorted into plastic baskets. T-shirts in one, underwear in another, misc in a third. The Daddy complains that it takes him 10 minutes to find matching socks in the morning so I sometimes humor him and make him his own mini-pile of paired socks on the bathroom counter.
I apologize if this destroys your vision of me as somebody with California Closets, but quite frankly, it’s a harsh world, and sometimes illusions are made to be shattered.
The baskets are, of course, a prelude to tidying it all away, except that lately I just haven’t made it to the tidying part before we have needed to wear the items in question. Which does cause me to wonder, why bother at all?
(Except - let’s not go any further down that path. It conflicts with my absolute denial of The Daddy’s argument that I should allow him to leave his stuff randomly all over the house, for easier retrieval at some undefined future date).
Whatever. Today I thought I would make an effort with the filing, so I started with the t-shirts. I was putting them on hangers when I realised The Daddy has a lot of t-shirts. While I have… 4 or 5. I am talking normal everyday wear, not the half of the closet which is full of pre-childbirth shirts which almost fit but cling in all the wrong places. Or the other half of the closet full of “yard wear” which once was good but has since been stained, torn or daubed with paint.
That’s the T-shirt tally. So what about pants? He has a few pairs and I have .. well, actually, more. Of course most of my pants are in the last basket which I haven’t yet mentioned. That’s the enormous basket sitting at the bottom of my closet.
That’s the “Ironing Basket”. More commonly known around here as the “Irony Basket”. Because not much ever escapes from there and even gets a whiff of an iron.
Let’s face it, some people are ironers and some people are just… not. I fall into the “not” category and really by now should have learned my lesson and have committed to owning nothing but polyester crease-free no-iron garments.
My mother, on the other hand, is a virtuoso ironer, who goes so far as to iron sheets, tea towels and even on occasion (though she will vehemently deny it) y-fronts. Do not deny it, mother, I saw you giving those tighty whiteys some iron love. You just could not resist, could you? My father is also a pretty dab hand with an iron, having been instructed in the fine art of pressing shirts by his Aunt Lib sometime in the 30s 50s.
So it should run in the genes, but that particular trait obviously skipped a generation. Or maybe I am adopted?
Moving on, I would like to address the obvious question:
“Ironing? Why so much ironing, don’t your clothes come out of the dryer all slinky and smooth?”
To which I say, Pah! What is this dryer of which you speak? Yes friends, it is true, I do not own a dryer. I hang my clothes on drying racks like this, or in the case of shirts, on hangers. And I leave them under a heater vent in winter. In summer I put them in the sun, out in the yard, and cross my fingers that I will not be reported by some nosy neighbor . When I bought my super-dooper new washing machine (at haste because the old one was broken and smelly and I had no clean underwear left) the salesman tried to reel me in with talk of “see you again when you return to purchase the matching dryer!”. But my head was not turned.
I can’t pretend that I would not enjoy a dryer. But you should not feel sorry for me. Because I do not own a dryer by choice.
Pausing here for the incredulous gasps to die down.
Did you know that on average 7% of household energy expenditure in the US goes into drying clothes? That figure astounded me too, which is why I have an empty space in my laundry where my dryer should sit. I do not spend half my day running around switching off lights after the children, only to see the resulting savings in energy disappear - poof! out the dryer vent. In short, not having a dryer saves lots of money the environment. And I am all about that.
And so the vicious cycle continues. The clothes get washed and hung to dry, and then they disappear into the bowels of the Basket System, sometimes never to be seen again. Occasionally something gets briefly and unenthusiastically ironed, while I dream - nay, fantasize - about employing a full-time washerwoman. (Although I may have trouble finding one, as I think that particular profession died out around the time they stopped banging clothes against rocks).
My grandmother, it was rumored, refused to marry my grandfather unless he paid for a washerwoman. And although a man of relatively modest means, he agreed (…that it was an obnoxious, horrible, soul destroying task and no woman of his should have to do it… ). Admittedly, he was saving her from having to slap clothes on rocks, but he is still totally my hero.
So good news, maybe I am not adopted after all.
Whoop-de-doo though, because those piles of laundry still keep on building up.
