It’s an almost-cold morning.  Gauzy fog the color of thin milk hangs in the canyons, brightened in the east by a 40-watt fluorescent sun.  The elm outside my office has half its leaves, yellow as old newspaper, tattered webs minus spiders, waiting for the first stiff storm to whoosh it all off, sodden, into courtyard corners and under limp umbrellas, demanding a broom.

            It’s a day for laundry.  That's not what I was supposed to be doing today, not what I planned even two hours ago when the coyotes yipped and howled me awake, not what the papers on my desk or the notes on my calendar say but what calls me like a voice once did at suppertime, to come inside. 

            Everyday laundry is a chore, same as doing dishes or making beds though it takes longer and is shockingly deceptive. There are only two of us in this house throwing things into hampers.  Days go by without enough lights or darks to make even one skinny load, and then I blink and clothes are spilling over the tops.  And why is it always when I’m heading out for an errand-packed afternoon and am almost past the laundry room, quiet as a tomb, that the washer rolls its eye at me?  If I’ve been out of town, like recently, there are soft, smelly mountains of the stuff, six loads or seven even, not counting my husband’s red T-shirt, which I toss back into his funky hamper to wait for some red friends.  I start load after load, heading down the hall between cooking dinner and eating it, between TV shows, during commercials.  Mr. Forte says, “What are you doing?”  “Laundry,” I say.  I’ve been known to impose towel restrictions to avoid being overrun by damp terry cloth, to swear like a sailor at my inability to remember to turn off the screeching Dryer Done signal on that last load late at night, to buy a six-pack of men’s undershirts at Costco instead of washing the dirty ones.

            Once in a blue moon, though, when summer is long gone and the weather has turned and especially when doing laundry feels like playing hooky from school, I’ll spend all day wrapped in its ordinariness, warm in its nook of a room, happily enveloped in damp air and lint.

            Every one of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies is indulged on Laundry Day.  Clothes and linens are sorted by color, care instructions and sometimes fabric.  Labels are read, knowledge of past results remembered, mesh bags retrieved from a drawer.  Plastic tubs take shirts squirted for stains to soak, water runs hot in the sink – the first whiff of vapor of the morning – the front-loader’s door locks with a clunk, the laundry symphony’s overture begins, and off I go, to delight in cleanliness and the process.

            Old people seem to develop an aversion to clean fabric, even the tidiest of them.  Maybe it’s the penny-counting they do when they see the gas and electric bills, maybe that their fading eyes can’t see the soup spots on their shirtfronts, maybe they’re too busy trying to stay alive to care.  All my stepmother’s musty blankets and tablecloths and napkins are coming clean today, reminders of breakfasts on yellow dishes and nights spent trying to sleep on the most uncomfortable twin beds in any guestroom anywhere in the world.  In emptying out her house last week, I found more dirty linen (literally and figuratively) than any of us ever knew existed, and I brought it all 450 miles away from the eyes of the hangers-on who watched me drive away.  Some of this stuff needs airing out, some needs disinfecting and some needs to be forgotten.  A small voice recites a lesson:  if some thing reveals something about you that you wouldn’t want someone who loves you to ever know, don’t save it.  I resolve to recheck some boxes in my own closets, soonest.

            The first load is ready to come out of the dryer and the routine is in full swing:  transfer washer load to dryer, check settings, press Start, lift whites that smell like Mr. Forte’s neck to washer, touch settings, press Start, turn to fold clothes from the dryer.  I am lost in laundry now, deep in its sloshing, sudsy ocean, warm in its monotonous mechanical hum.  There is the Father Daughter Weekend T-shirt from 1989, the brown socks of mine that look like his (I always have to check), the shirt from the airplane crash, the robe with the bleach dots.  Laundry is life.

            I’m crazy enough to have two ironing boards, though I rarely iron, preferring to wear slightly wrinkled things snapped from the dryer if the alternative is ironing on a hot day.  One board is ordinary, its narrowed nose for clothes, with a silver cover, slick as glass, brownish in the middle.  The other is rectangular and huge in both directions and bright blue, for sheets and tablecloths; no surprise that it’s a Martha Stewart board.  If I had a boat, I could iron sails on it; it’s the Hummer of ironing boards, and I love it.  My iron is a huge stony weight, and it’s dialed to High, whooshing steam, water gurgling behind its pretty turquoise plastic window.

            Surrounded by stacks of white towels and carefully folded underwear, matched socks and soft winter fleeces, nightgowns and napkins, I stand ironing pillowcases with tears in my eyes.  I love the smell of hot cotton, of detergent, of bleach.  I love the sounds of the hisssss from the huffing iron, the swish-thud of the wet clothes in the washer, the random clink of the metal buttons on my jeans against the dryer drum.  I love being in this steamy tropical world of grey-blue tile and white cabinets, folding the clothes that hold my husband’s body, that touch his skin.  I miss my mother as I fold her blankets, now devoid of dog hair and the smell of Chanel, and I’m profoundly sad for the person she became in the last years of her life.  I am washing her away, layers of grime and crust tinted with deception sluicing down the drain.  I am pressing the soft, crumpled memory of the woman I knew against the weight of my heart.

 image from www.walkerzanger.com/catalog/ecatalog.php