I understand that clean clothes are necessary in today’s civilized world, but it’s strange how much laundry has evolved. When you’re a kid, the clothes appear magically in your dresser. Sometimes you get dirt on your favorite shirt, and you cry, so your mom takes the shirt and magically replaces it with a clean one! Neat!
Then you learn about THE MACHINES.
We’re fortunate to have the machines; there are still people and places that don’t. But once you learn about the machines, you slowly begin to understand that they’re beasts that must be continuously fed. I learned about laundry during high school. Everything was pretty easy to handle, because for guys, laundry is relatively simple: white underwear and socks in one pile, light t-shirts in a second, dark t-shirts and jeans in a third. Simple: three loads, no problems.
Then you get married or live with someone, and then things get a bit nuts. You start separating out delicates into light and dark. You learn about water temperature and the power of red to dye everything else. Maybe you do a tie-dye and use the washing machine for entertainment purposes. You learn about lingerie bags and the fine art of washing pantyhose. Things get more confusing.
Then you have kids. Your laundry demands increase to the point where you’re doing loads daily just to keep up. Not only are you separating your clothes into whites, regular darks, regular lights, delicate darks, delicate lights, dry-clean only, sweaters, and oversize blankets, there’s now baby laundry to be Drefted, spit up stains to pre-treat, and the sizes. Oh, the sizes.
When the laundry comes out of the dryer, you have your underwear, your wife’s underwear, your son’s underwear, your daughter’s underwear, usually decorated with a Hispanic girl or a unicorn emblem. Then you have the “fits him”, “used to fit him”, “too big but we were out of clothes that day”, “fits her”, “neighbor kid”, “too small for her”, “hand me down from him to her”, your regular clothes, your wife’s regular clothes, the sweaters (which hopefully you remembered to place on the drying rack instead of in the dry…aw dang), the jeans, the pants, the T-shirts which are all turned inside out to protect the emblem, the dress slacks, the shorts, the capri pants, the bras (which again should be air dried), the clothes that shouldn’t be dried before your other checks them to see if the stain got out, and so on and so forth.
Finally, you’re done, so it’s time to take off your clothes and put on pajamas because it’s past your bedtime. So you toss the clothes into the hamper, realizing that the beasts need feeding again.