A few posts back, I said I've never misplaced a baby in a load of laundry, which is true enough. What I didn’t menion is that until this weekend, my laundry was piled so high, you could lose an English Sheepdog in it.
I actually love doing laundry, which makes it puzzling as to why I put it off for so long. I like sorting things into piles; I like that clean laundry smell when pulling warm laundry from the dryer. I like folding. I got a special folding apparatus from the Container Store that folds anything from dress shirts and pants to tee shirts and bath towels into identically-sized rectangles. I love identically-sized rectangles.
I’ve long noticed that if I do laundry 20 minutes a day—whether sorting or washing and drying or folding or ironing and putting things away—I stay completely on top of laundry. I also know that whenever I let it go, the amount of time it takes to catch up is directly proportionate to the 20-minute a day principle. Don’t do laundry for a week, and I’ll have a couple hours to do on the weekend. In this case, I had about 8 hours of laundry to do in order to catch up. You do the math.
And yet: it’s not like I never did laundry in the last month. More like over the past couple months, I kept doing laundry yet never got around to putting the clean it away. So this weekend I got out the iron and the ironing board, the wrinkle releaser and that folding apparatus.
After the first hour, you could still hide a German Sheppard in the pile. An hour later, you couldn’t hide a Sheppard, but you could lose a Cocker Spaniel. Yet another hour later, you wouldn’t be able to conceal a Spaniel, but could cover a Lhasa Apso. At four hours, you still couldn’t find a Yorkshire Terrier. “Not a Yorkshire Terrier,” Alpay corrected when I asked his opinion. “ A Yorkie-poo.”
Somewhere around the Lhasa Apso mark, I realized that there was actually another pile. It was in the master closet and could hide a Cocker Spaniel. It took another three and a half hours to deal with that; at least now we can sit in our bedside chair and we finally have something to wear. But it's those perfectly folded teeshirts that make it all worthwhile.
