If you need me...

If you need me, I’ll be in the laundry room. Yes, that’s right: the laundry room. It is where I currently reside. At one time, I had a home; a beautiful home, with four bedrooms and lots of shiny bathrooms. Wait, maybe I still have that home? Anyway, that doesn’t matter anymore, because I live in the laundry room. It’s not an unpleasant room, really. It is a pale, nameless cream colour and it has a window, through which I glimpse a sliver of a wide world that is sometimes sunny, or stormy, where people walk dogs and kids play ball.

In the laundry room, it’s hard to tell what time of day it is. It’s like those windowless casinos where they pump oxygen, so that you keep betting all night and the next day, with no sense of the hours that pass. I guess I don’t really need to know what time it is; I have my own clock in the laundry room. The hands strike the following hours:

HOUR ONE: Stinky whites, mostly balled-up or inside-out sports socks, as well as various pieces of underclothing with faded stains and yellowing tones. For the record, I start with whites because that’s how I learned to do laundry at my mother’s house, where her state-of-the-art 60’s machine would spew the slightly soiled, warm water into the adjacent sink after the whites had been through the rinse cycle so that the water could be re-used (how environmental and gross all at the same time!) for washing the next load, which had to be light colours that wouldn’t run.

HOUR TWO: Light colours, including towels that have been left on the floor, forgotten, retrieved and added to laundry piles in twisted, smelly piles that dampen and pollute all the clothes in the basket.

HOUR THREE: This round is for the additional twisted, malodorous whites that I find in gym bags, under the sofas, and in the bathrooms, which didn’t make it into the first load.

HOUR FOUR: Dark colours including more jeans than I have ever owned in my life, making me think that my teen-aged daughter is putting them in the dirty laundry pile, after simply trying them on in the tortured morning ritual of finding something to wear.

HOUR FIVE: Reds. Does anyone else separate reds? For some reason, I think I’m supposed to do that, so here we go with a smaller load of oranges, reds and purples with red undertones that are mostly sports jerseys and shorts that were supposed to be clean and dry for the game last night.

HOUR SIX: A final load of darks comprising clothes that I find in my husband’s gym bag, stiffened into artistic forms, and more sports shorts and shirts in which my pre-teen son lives these days – usually for an hour or so before changing to a fresh outfit for the next game or practice or whatever.

You may be thinking that six hours is a pretty short day and that I’m doing pretty well for myself but what you don’t know is that clothes were still piling up while I was washing. New heaps and trails of crumpled clothing in bedrooms, bathrooms and living areas mock me. It’s enough to make a grown woman cry! Well, okay, laugh maniacally, I guess! Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be in the laundry room.