Man, Mondays are not my favorite. Why? LAUNDRY DAY. Which, I know, I could move to another day. But my mom always did laundry on Mondays. Why do I remember? Because I always had to wear the pink corduroy pants that I HATED on Mondays. I had two pairs: when one was being washed, the other were being worn. And I had piano lessons on Monday, lessons I generally hadn’t prepared for. So I was doing something I didn’t want to do in clothes I didn’t want to wear.
I’m sure this was only one year. I can’t imagine that Mom bought me Bright Hideously Pink Corduroy Pants every year that I lived in her house. But it was That Scarring.
When I was single, I did the ol’ “wear every item in the closet, perhaps a couple of times, before doing laundry”. I scared a college roommate more than once by emerging from underneath a ginormous pile of laundry on my bed: my slumbering self blended right in with the mammoth pile of fabric.
When I got married and even had my first born, I still did laundry only in dire circumstances. I remember the highlight of my mom coming to visit is that I could actually fold laundry after I washed it: novel idea! And since I had a child who liked to decorate any surface with the meal he had just partaken of, laundry day meant washing EVERYTHING we owned. Plus, we lived in a townhouse with on-area laundry machines that required quarters. In this day and age of debit cards, who has change?!! Quarters were a coveted commodity: I’d go to real laundromats or car washes to get them with a harried look in my eye and dried-on-food somewhere on a garment I was wearing.
Now I do laundry on Mondays. For a while I did a load whenever there was enough clothes to fill the washer, but then my mom commented on how interesting it was that all our white clothes were turning gray, and I thought, “Huh. They’re not supposed to look that way?”
I actually read a book (yes, I am that much of a geek) teaching me how to do laundry. It was FASCINATING. The tags: you know, those things that itch at your back and curl with repeated washings and are generally annoying? They have information on them. Information that actually *means* something. And makes the clothes last longer and look better. I had NO idea! It was revolutionary, like when I watched my first episode of Alton Brown when he explained how when putting honey in a cake instead of sugar that you would reduce the liquid to account for the honey, and it just made sense: you mean, there’s a reason behind it? Same with laundry.
The laundry book said to do wash once a week so that enough clothes would pile up to do a full load of whatever washing conditions were required. So I do. I read tags, I sort, and I actually find it a bit more interesting.
Tonight, for the second time ever, I made my own laundry detergent. I know the book wouldn’t agree (she said that laundry detergents were painstakingly researched for the best color-preservation/cleaning-action), but the sustainable side of me says “phooey”. I figure the reading of the labels, the sorting, the doing laundry on Laundry Day, the not-walking-around-with-crusties-on-my-pants-having-not-washed-them-in-a-month should count for something, eh?
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