Recently my 8-year-old daughter–who is studying the American Revolution–informed me that the Colonists washed their clothes once a year in May.
That’s when I realized I was born in the wrong time. I belong in 1776, a daughter of the American Revolution. This is a period whose laundry habits make sense.
Once a year is just right. The average American household washes 468 loads of laundry a year. This is overkill. It wrecks the fabric, wastes water and, worse, forces me to futilely seek mates for countless socks destined to spend the remainder of their lonely lives at the bottom of my laundry basket. That’s because the other purple sock, striped sock and daisy sock have become a retirement community for dustballs beneath my daughter’s bed.
One day a year swishing a couple of outfits in the stream. Fresh air. No moldy laundry room that looks like the future scene of an ax murderer coming to your home soon.
Pilgrim women had it made. They weren’t haunted by memories of accidentally drying their daughter’s beloved sweatshirt on “hot” to discover it now fit her pet guinea pig. Nor did they have to explain why their husband’s black socks regularly emerged coated with a chiffonade of white facial tissue. They also didn’t have hampers.
Hampers are a plague. No sooner have I emptied mine of its musty contents than its wicker walls begin to breed madly–like alien life forms in a horror movie–from sock cells left behind.
But that’s no movie. That’s my husband.
“Sock red-alert!” he shouts from his closet.
“That’s impossible! I just washed your socks,” I say. And I did, too. A couple weeks ago. “Don’t exaggerate.”
“OK, take it down to yellow alert, I’ve got four pair left,” he admits.
“DEFCON 5,” he warned three mornings later.
My husband likes to convey a sense of panic about the state of his underwear drawer. He knows I only do laundry under extreme deadline pressure. It’s more satisfying to single-handedly avert an underpants crisis than to keep drawers boringly full of fluffy white briefs. This way I’m a laundry superhero.
He insists on having at least one pair of clean socks and underpants in his drawer before he goes to bed at night.
My personal inventory control is more casual. The contents of my drawer are a total surprise every morning. I could find 10 pair of freshly laundered underpants or zero.
If it’s zero I have to figure out how to get a pair fast. In my younger, apartment-dwelling days I rose to this challenge by baking my freshly washed underwear in the oven. I had to discontinue this practice, however, when one morning I opened the oven door to discover my bikini briefs resembled a side order of bacon.
Some laundry never sees water. These are clothes that have the unfortunate words “hand-washable” on the label. They might as well be sentenced to Alcatraz. Several of my daughter’s hand-washable sweaters have languished on the laundry room floor for months. I think she has forgotten she owns them. Pretty soon she will outgrow them, then I can give them away and let somebody else wash them. Or perhaps they have aired out by now and can be put back in the drawer.
I don’t think the airing out technique gets enough credit. Haven’t you ever intended to wash something and the seasons fly by and then you pick it up and wonder why it was in the dirty clothes hamper to begin with?
Folding clean laundry, on the other hand, is overrated. Doesn’t it make more sense to leave the clothes basket in the middle of the family room and let people pick out their socks and pajamas on a per need basis? It’s festive to begin every day with a treasure hunt.
Meanwhile, I am trying to train my family to adopt 1776 laundry values. My husband now wears the same T-shirt and jeans for an indeterminate number of weekends.
“I’m conserving my clothes,” he says, “plus that hamper is so full if you put something it in it, it jumps out.”
My daughter, however, appears to own stock in Lever Brothers. Thus, I must eyeball her “dirty clothes” to clear them for washing readiness. Much of them do not pass the test (I can scratch out that crust with my fingernail!). The rejected items simply need a little smoothing and they are good as washed.
“What is it about doing laundry that is so abhorrent to you?” asked my husband the other day. Spoken like a man who still doesn’t know how the washing machine works.
I think I’ll send him downstairs to do a load. Experience is the best teacher.
