Quarantine Diary #53 5/4/2020 Why Does the Laundry Always Loom?

I did cleaning and laundry this morning. My fav (not) part is moving stuff from the second floor to the first floor to the basement and then back. Because who doesn’t love a Stairmaster with a dirty bathroom at one end and half-done laundry at the other?

Long ago (and far away) I read an article where the author interviewed many 1950’s and 60’s graduates of Wellesley College. Many of the women had gone on to brilliant careers. (Looking at you, Hillary).  One of the questions for these illustrious women was “What surprised you the most about adult life?”

Many of these movers and shakers answered, “Who knew there would be so much laundry?”

I often put laundry on my to-do list without clearly considering how much time it will take. Carrying it around the house, starting it, moving it, hanging some, carrying again, folding, putting away… Laundry is NOT a quick chore. Yet like many housekeeping activities it’s invisible if you do it and only noticeable if you don’t.

So here we are at home nearly all the time and no one else is writing about laundry during quarantine. So I thought I would.

• One of the early things to go when money is tight is a laundromat. What is happening in hard-pressed families who do their laundry that way?
• When I was young and between paychecks I would sometimes do my laundry via the bathtub. It’s hard work. Rinsing soapy stuff is a bear, hanging things to dry in a place not set up for that is stressful. And after you get it all hung around, there’s no place to sit.
• One of the chores put off to another day when one is working from home, helping kids to their schoolwork at home, cooking from home, ordering most of what the family needs (at new websites one needs to figure out) from home – is keeping up with laundry.  So I suspect there are baskets of laundry piling up these days. For those who notice and care, this is more stress.

 To which I have this to say.

Our economy is in freefall. All sorts of gloomy-doomers are saying our only hope is to sacrifice the oldsters and vulnerable so that everybody else can go back to their jobs right now no matter what.

That kind of thinking works well enough if what you care about most is preserving the infrastructure of your old rich life. And you don’t lose anyone to this disease. Good luck with that.

Can we be more imaginative. Can we think outside of the damned old box?

Laundry is one of those places we can START to reinvent an economy that supports modern families.  Everyone needs their towels washed. Our beds need clean sheets. We need clean underwear and clean clothes.  All of this is about being healthy and functional.

So why does modern society not value and then create systems for doing all laundry? In the ‘Old, Old West’ cowboys could leave their dirty clothes at someone’s house and pick it up the next day. My grandmother took in shirts to wash and iron during the Great Depression. My mom took our sheets and towels to a downtown laundry when I was a kid. I still remember picking up the clean stuff which was in a “brown paper package wrapped up with string.”  (First time I heard that Sound of Music line I thought Julie Andrews was singing about clean laundry.) There is no reason laundry has to be done in-house by one person who puts it on her to-do list as if it’s a 10-minute job when it’s not.

Doing the family laundry is ripe for change. We can make it cheaper than $1500-worth of appliances every five years. Community laundry can be MUCH more ecological than millions and millions of plastic bottles of somewhat dubious chemicals. When the minimum wage becomes $15 and health care is not tied to employment – boom, here is an industry that can get up and going pretty quickly, bringing many workers along with it. And freeing many more people to do the other things their families and jobs need them to do.

There’s a problem right here, under our noses, smelling stale.

There’s a solution right there, too, and its just fresh, clean laundry.

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Oh, and one more thing.