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To be clear, if you own a washing machine, IT does the laundry. Today’s washing machines allow you to select your water temperature, spin speed and washing aggressiveness: delicates, hand washing or heavy duty. Washing machines actually wash the clothes and I can put the exclamation point on this sentence because at one time, my new washing machine broke and I had to actually wash all of my laundry for two weeks, while I waited for the machine to be repaired. It wasn’t that hard washing the clothes in my large sink, but it was back-breaking (actually arm-breaking) wringing out the clothes so that they could go in the dryer. So why then, do I continue to refer to my task of doing laundry in the first person? It’s simple; it’s because I have to FOLD the clean clothes!
I remember when I was young and my Mother did my laundry, folding my clothes and tucking them neatly away in my allotted drawer space. Back then, I had no real opinion on what I wore. As soon as I started developing an opinion on my wardrobe, my Mother continued to wash my clothes, but stopped folding them. Who could blame her —with four girls, she had trouble distinguishing whose clothes were whose, and so, the clean laundry was placed in a basket and we had to separate and fold our own items.
For some reason, I never enjoyed this task and since I never really embraced it, I was never very good at it. I envied how my sisters had neatly folded T-shirts and pajamas, while mine seemed to be a stack of mismatched wrinkles. When my teenage friends were getting their first jobs in retail stores, I knew that my best hope for employment was to find a restaurant where there was not a folding requirement. When I became a mother, my laundry load increased exponentially, but my folding skills improved only slightly; towels were folded into simple squares, pants folded into halves and T-shirts looked like a mass of odd shaped rectangles. Sheets always seemed to look like a ball and socks, those that I could match, were even littler balls.
Today, my laundry load has certainly decreased, and my washing machine has gotten even more clever, but folding the clean laundry, still remains one of my least favorite tasks, and even though my folding skills have improved over time, I am still not very good at it, preferring to hang more clothing than I pile into my drawers. It is not uncommon that my husband will often add his dirty laundry to the clean (and folded) clean laundry basket.
I think my daughter was all of 10 when she became a better folder than me and specifically requested that I STOP folding her clothes. Come to think of it, perhaps I am far more clever at folding clothes than I give myself credit for.
WRINKLED? WRINKLED?
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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