A prime example of my domestic ineptitude would be my
history with laundry. When I was a kid, Mom did the laundry, and the most I had
to do was gather it from my siblings’ and my rooms. When I was a child, Mom
asked me to put the clothes in the washing machine. I readily agreed, and I
carted the laundry with me to the basement. Mom loves to tell the story about
how I came upstairs a few minutes later and bewilderedly asked her which one
was the washing machine. That was more or less the end of my laundry career.
Every now and again, if Mom was really desperate for help, she’d ask me to sort
the laundry into lights and darks. I even struggled with that. That green shirt
could be a light OR a dark, and I wasn’t about to be the one who screwed up the
laundry. And don’t even get me started on clothes with multiple colors: stripes
were the worst.
It should be no surprise, then, as I grew older and started
buying my own clothes, I paid close attention to the labels. Not labels as in
brands: labels as in washing instructions. I avoided anything and everything
that said “hand wash” or, even worse, “dry clean only.” If my clothes were
wrinkly, oh well: rather than iron them, I would wear the wrinkly clothes and
hope that no one noticed.
My laundry troubles only grew when I went to college and
discovered that I now had to PAY to wash my clothes! I learned to hoard
quarters and ration clothes carefully: you saved your best clothes for the
weekends and wore all the other junk during the week. You wouldn’t want to be
caught in something less than wonderful at the local skeezy house party! Like
any other college student, I brought along loads of laundry every time I came
to visit my parents. I had never realized what a luxury it was: I didn’t have
to pay to wash my clothes there, and I didn’t have to babysit my laundry for
fear someone would remove it prematurely from the washing machine so they
themselves could take over. The college laundry room was a brutal place.
The following year, the campus did away with the
coin-operated machines and laundry was free! What a wonderful year that was. I
washed my clothes on a regular person schedule of once a week, as opposed to
the college person schedule of “whenever I can find enough quarters” or the
more dire “whenever I run out of underwear.” You still had to watch your
laundry in case someone snaked your machine, but it wasn’t nearly as painful
since it was free. That was definitely the best of my sophomore year of
college.
During my junior and senior years, I lived off-campus in a
house with a number of my friends. We had a washer and dryer in the basement,
so I felt as though I could continue washing my clothes whenever I darn well
pleased. And here, I wouldn’t have to sit and watch my clothes! How wonderful!
Or so I thought…
It didn’t take long before I realized that something wasn’t
quite right with the dryer. The straps on some of my tank tops looked a little
singed. Odd, indeed. I kept on washing and drying my clothes like I always did,
until the day that the tank top straps were practically burned in half. Some of
my other clothes had rusty-looking streaks across them… what on earth was the
problem?! I asked my other roommates if they’d had the same problem, and they
confirmed that the dryer was destroying their clothes, as well. The clothes
would get caught somewhere in the dryer, and it would proceed to BURN them. I
stopped using the Dryer from Hell immediately and began dragging my laundry to
my parents’ house again.
The only thing that the dryer didn’t ruin was jeans. Since
the material was so much thicker than all of my other wimpy college clothes,
the Hell Dryer was no match for denim. I could continue to dry my jeans, but
nothing else. One day, I decide to wash my winter coat with my jeans. It was
thick; it could certainly withstand the wrath of the Hell Dryer. So I tossed my
red coat in the washing machine with several pairs of jeans. My red wool coat.
I bet you know where this is going.
When I pulled my clothes out of the washing machine, my coat
looked slightly smaller, and all my jeans had a pink tint. Yes. Because I’m an
idiot, I dyed my jeans pink. I immediately called my mom to find out how to fix
it. After she stopped laughing, she told me that I was more or less out of
luck. I could try washing them again (without the red coat), which I did.
Sadly, the second time through the wash did nothing: I was stuck with a whole
bunch of purply-colored jeans.
My laundry misadventures continued into my basement
apartment in Plymouth, Minnesota. James and I lived in a converted garage
underneath someone’s house (thanks, Craigslist!), so we had no washer and
dryer. We were banished to, horror of horrors, the laundromat, which is just
about my least favorite place on earth. James and I went to the cheapest place
we could find, and unfortunately, “cheap” and “scary” go hand-in-hand in
laundromat world. Whenever the time came to do laundry, we brought along books
and tried not to make eye contact with anybody.
 |
| Never trust a place with dryers bigger than you. |
One evening, I was in dire need of clean pairs of jeans.
James wasn’t getting home until late, and there was no way I was going to the
creepy laundromat by myself. Like any logically challenged individual, I
decided that I was going to wash my jeans in the shower. The shower in question
had no bathtub attached… it was just a shower. You can imagine how well this
turned out. I all but flooded the bathroom trying to get my jeans rinsed out.
Then, there was the question of how to dry them. I squeezed all the water I
could out of said jeans, but they were still sopping wet and weighed about a
ton. Since I am brilliant, I thought it would be best to hang the jeans on
outside. Did I mention that it was February? James came home to find three
pairs of frozen jean-cicles draped on the railing. I sheepishly explained my
seemingly ingenious plan, and I thought James was going to suffocate; he was
laughing so hard. Turns out I’m good at making people laugh when it comes to my
laundry ideas.
And now, here I am, living in my lovely Sioux Falls
apartment and STILL bringing laundry home to my parents. When will I grow out
of that? Not until I have a washer and dryer of my very own. A washer, I might
add, that gets all the soap out of the clothes (unlike the washer in
Minneapolis) and a dryer that doesn’t burn anything (Morris dryer) or leave
nasty little lint particles all over your partially-dried clothing (Sioux Falls
dryer). Is that really too much to ask? It’s not for lack of effort that I
reverted to my parents’ laundry room; I just have high expectations that none
of my laundry facilities have been able to meet. Plus, I never have enough
quarters.
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