Laundry

Our washing machine is broken. The piles are dirty clothes are starting to grow, overflowing their containers and spilling onto the kitchen floor. Our washer and dryer are stuffed into the small utility room off the kitchen, along with the dog crate and a myriad of small kitchen appliances that don't often get used. This tiny space also manages to house the furnace and hot water heater.

In the butter yellow house on Hurd Avenue there's really no place to hide the overflow of a busy life. Or of a broken washer.

Laundry is my favorite household task. There is something about removing warm, softly scented pieces of clothing from the dryer that brings me squarely into the moment. The rhythm of bending, grabbing, folding, smoothing and breathing is meditation in motion. I watch the sun rising out the windows above the dryer and feel at peace.

I'm not sure where this love of laundry came from. I don't really think it was from my mother. The house I grew up in was huge. It was old and had lots of quirks. There was a bathtub in a closet and a tombstone for a dog in the front yard. The kitchen had a fireplace and there was a laundry chute that dumped it's contents on the basement floor.

You could ignore a whole lot of laundry if you never went down the basement.

It was often my job to go down there and put the clothes that were in the washer into the dryer and bring the newly dried clothes upstairs to fold. There was only one problem with that – I was scared to go into the basement. It was dark and the washer and dryer were in the opposite corner from the stairs. The house had a huge, old fashioned gas furnace who's ductwork reminded me of octopus arms. They snaked around and terminated at various spots in the ceiling. In order to get to the laundry area you were forced to duck to get under those huge arms.

As soon as I got to the foot of the stairs leading down the basement my stomach would lurch and seize and I would run, ducking and weaving around the furnace monster – trying not to panic. As I wildly flailed around for the single light bulb's pull string above the washer, the mountain of laundry underneath the chute would cast shadows on the walls. It was only after finally turning on the light that I could breathe again.

I hated that laundry was my responsibility.

When my mother would call for me to go down there and bring up another load of clothes sometimes I would pretend that I couldn't hear her. I would continue reading my book or listening to my radio as though her request had never come. Eventually she would call out, "Have you gotten that laundry yet?" I would mutter under my breath, "Give me a minute," knowing that I couldn't put off the attention to the laundry forever.

I wasn't lazy or bad-tempered. I was simply overcome by the tedium of constantly doing something that never ended. No matter how many trips I made to the basement, no matter how many times I confronted my fear of the furnace, there was always more laundry to do. The mountains of muddy jeans, twisted up t-shirts, wadded pajamas, damp towels and knotted sheets were just waiting to reappear. Day in. Day out.

When I walked into my kitchen this morning and saw the overflowing baskets of dirty laundry that were demanding some kind of attention, I saw my life. It too demands attention. It cries out for some kind of completion, just like the countless tasks that fill up my days. When I was ten I perfected the art of ignoring my chores and feigning deafness to the calls of my mother. I did it at my own peril. I still do.

But, I can't ignore life. Like a mountain of dirty laundry, sometimes life reeks with reality. It is here. It is now. I don't have a choice but to just live.