Are you a fan of laundry? I know who I am. I hate when my husband decides to do laundry because his favorite pair of jeans is dirty. I shudder every time I hear the words: “I threw away a load of clothes earlier.” A myriad of scenes replay in my mind about what might have been in the laundry basket, since he doesn’t know the meaning of separating anything. Dirty paint or construction clothes, jeans, sweaty bike clothes, khaki dress shirt and pants, grass-stained white socks with lots of dirt, all go in the same load.
“You didn’t throw that blue sweater, did you?” I asked, thinking of the time she threw my two hundred dollar Anne Fontaine sweater in the dryer; it will soon be delegated to my five-year-old niece.
I have since decided to separate most of my delicates, but there are still those occasional things that go to the regular laundry basket that are not considered delicate enough to go to the white delicate basket (for whites), or to the blue (for dark ones). ) delicate basket. And those things cannot go to the dryer. My husband, for the most part, has learned this, but his remedy is to not wash any more of mine, which is also frustrating because now he has thrown away my charging system and my laundry pile is too small to justify two separate loads. .
If you’re a laundry fanatic like me, you will relate to all of this. But I go beyond that. If my husband (on rare occasions) decides to fold the clothes, I will re-fold everything. All my towels, for example, need to be folded the same way, leaving no ragged edges in my linen closet. My husband’s underwear drawer is quite large and he shares his space with his shirts and socks. I carefully fold each shirt as if it were on display in a department store, I combine socks and have individual stacks of various colors, and on the far right, lies all of his neatly folded underwear. I do this, I think, with love, until the next time I open the drawer to store more endless clothes, always abundant, (how does a man dirty so many clothes in a week?) And there I find what looks like the Tasmanian devil himself has rummaged in his drawer. I scold him, I beg him, I threaten to go on strike, but none of that works, he doesn’t care! I’ve even threatened to fold his shirts the way they go into the laundry basket, inside out, and then he uses them that way just to irritate me.
The truth is, I really don’t do it “with love” and “for him.” I do it for my OCD tendencies. I can’t bear to see things out of order. “A place for everything and everything in its place.” But I have come to terms with this. My husband and I disagree when it comes to doing laundry. His nemesis is that I don’t help him in the garden, but that’s my revenge for all my chores inside.
“That’s not my job, it’s outdoor work,” I say, as I walk back to the house.
