Thoughts from the Laundromat

I have been poor, and I have been not poor. As far as I can tell, there are only a few significant differences between those two economic states: what kind of meat you eat (and how much), and where you do your laundry.

When you are poor (or camping, which is sort of the same thing on a temporary, volunteer basis), you do your laundry in the laundromat. You gather up all your dirties in a giant pile in the middle of a bedsheet and slog down to the local washateria for a couple of hours of mind-numbing bending, lifting, wheeling great gobs of wet cloth around in carts with challenging, non-working casters, burning fingers, separating loads of almost-dry from not-at-all-dry, shifting into working dryers from non-working dryers, complaining to the management, fending off conversation with sketchy characters you would give a wide berth to on the street, and trying to cadge enough quarters for the whole thing to be DONE, so you can fold in peace and go home.

There is also a middle ground of laundry world, where your apartment building has a few washers and dryers, saving you the trip to the general public laundromat, but constraining you with the first-come, first-served scheduling. If your neighbor beats you to the laundry room, your day is shot. Or, if your neighbor doesn't come back when their load is dry, you are left with the uncomfortable dilemma of whether to remove their clean laundry from the dryer you want to use and risk their wrath when you lose a baby sock down the gap by the hoses. I have been yelled at by complete strangers, even when I knew they should be apologizing to ME for blowing off their laundry chores and not removing their clothes promptly.

The lap of luxury as far as I am concerned is being able to do laundry in your own home. When Bill and I received our first washer and dryer as a gift from my grandparents, I thought we had finally hit the big-time. The unimaginable freedom of being able to do a load every few days so it didn't turn into a full-day chore of gathering,sorting, pre-treating, washing, drying and folding every blessed piece of clothing we owned! Not having to find or feed quarters, resenting every coin spent on another 6 minutes of dryer heat! To choose whether to line dry or heat dry! The ability to wash, dry and fold at my leisure!

But at the end of summer, when the well is dry, the spring smells of sulfur, and I don't want to use what precious water we have on clothes, I revisit the laundromat, and I am, in one word, grateful.

I have washed clothes in a New Zealand laundromat with the kind of washers without a spin cycle--that is, they washed in a mechanized tub, and then I ran them through a hand-cranked wringer. I have stood on the banks of the river in Fiji, watching the women hand-scrubbing their clothes on rocks, while trying to keep an eye on their children playing in the water (and hopefully, not drowning). I have walked by the open-air "laundromat" in San Miguel, Mexico, as the women bent over cement tubs, agitating by hand, squeezing by hand, and then hauling heavy, wet clothes in baskets on their backs, trudging home, where it then had to be hung on lines in a living room for days.

So I really don't mind the few hours each month I have to spend not being able to wash at home. It gives me an opportunity to knit quietly (as long as I remember to check that my knitting needles aren't in with the clothes), brush up on my Spanish with the local construction workers who are in for their weekly wash chores on Sunday afternoon, and reflect on how nice it is to have a choice of where I do my laundry. Is this a great country or what???