Are you a fan of laundry? I know who I am. I hate it when my husband decides to do a load of laundry because his favorite pair of jeans is dirty. I cringe every time I hear the words, “I dumped a load of laundry before.” Myriad scenes replay in my mind about what might be in the laundry basket, as he doesn’t know the meaning of separating anything. Dirty paint or construction clothes, jeans, sweaty biker clothes, dress shirt and khakis, grass-stained white socks with mounds of dirt all go in the same load.
“You didn’t throw away that blue sweater, did you?” I asked, thinking back to the time she tossed my two hundred dollar Anne Fontaine sweater into the dryer; It will soon be delegated to my five year old niece.
Since then, I’ve decided to separate most of my delicates, but there are still the occasional things that go into the regular laundry bin that aren’t considered delicate enough to go into the white delicates bin (for whites) or the bin. blue (for dark garments). ) delicate basketball. And those things can’t go in the dryer. My husband, for the most part, has learned this, but his remedy is to not wash any more of mine, which is also frustrating because now he’s gotten rid of my charging system and my laundry pile is too small to justify two . separate loads.
If you are a fan of laundry like me, you will identify with all this. But I go beyond that. If my husband (on rare occasions) decides to fold clothes, I’ll refold everything. All my towels, for example, should be folded the same way, not exposing any jagged edges in my linen closet. My husband’s underwear drawer is quite large and shares his space with his shirts and socks. I painstakingly fold each shirt as if it were on display in a department store, match the socks and have individual piles of various colors, and on the far right, all of his neatly folded undergarments lie. I do this, I think, with love, until the next time I open the drawer to pull out more of the never-ending and ever abundant flow of clothes (how does one man dirty so many clothes in a week?) and there I find what appears to be the devil himself. from Tasmania has searched in his drawer. I scold him, I plead with him, I threaten to go on strike, but none of it works, he doesn’t care! I’ve even threatened to fold his shirts the same way they go in the laundry basket, inside out, and then wear them that way just to irritate me.
The truth is that I don’t really do it “with love” and “for him”. I do it because of my OCD tendencies. I can’t stand to see things messed up. “A place for everything and everything in its place.” But I have come to terms with this. My husband and I live at odds when it comes to laundry. His nemesis is that I don’t help him in the garden, but that’s my reward for all my indoor chores.
“That’s not my job, it’s outdoor work,” I say, as I walk back to the house.
