Break-In or Break-Out?

The day started off innocently enough. We had slept soundly. Everything looked and felt normal. There were no overt signs or sounds of a break-in…

I got up, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and dressed for the gym. I grabbed an armload of laundry and headed downstairs to toss it all into the washing machine, where I had casually dumped a couple of towels and cleaning rags the previous morning. The plan was to fill the load today and run the thing at capacity. But then…

I opened the lid, and found it empty.

What?

Where are the things I had left inside? I looked around the laundry room. Nothing on the floor. Nothing on top of the dryer… Then I looked inside the dryer.

Omigosh, omigosh, omigosh—scare me to death—the missing laundry was in the dryer, clean and dry! There was only one conclusion: a burglar had gotten into the house and done this tiny load of laundry!

I struggled to get my breathing under control, and reached for the phone to call 911. Then I realized I should tell my husband, the Center of the Universe (CoTU) first. I wouldn’t want the sirens to be his first awareness of this.

I found him upstairs at his computer, and broke the news as gently as I could. “Honey—I’m sorry, but there’s a problem downstairs. It looks like we’ve had an intruder, and I’m not talking about another squirrel.”

Of course, he jumped up and freaked out. “What? Where—what happened?”

“Calm down,” I said, there doesn’t appear to be any real damage, just a load of laundry done.”

He sank back down in his chair, and attempted to wither me into shame with an icy glare.

No explanation was forthcoming.

“Hello???” I prodded. “You know, some things are givens. The sun will rise in the east, the Mississippi flows south, highway 40 will jam at the 141 overpass, and you do not touch the washing machine. These are not facts because I wish them to be so, they seem to be forces of nature. Well, at least the first two. The others I have come to believe because of so many years of observation and experience. I open the washer and expect to see what I left there the day before. It has always been so. You can’t do something so unexpected and out-of-character and think I’m not going to be stunned. I need an explanation.”

“Ummm… it’s really no big deal… I wanted to clean my new lens cloths, and you were in that all-day workshop, so I stuck them in the washer and did it.  Dried ‘em, too.”

“But,” I struggled to say with aplomb, “it seems that there’s always been a force field in the laundry room that repelled you from the washer and dryer. Remember the time I was away on Father’s Day and left your card and gift inside the dryer, knowing full well you would never run across it accidentally? I had to call you and tell you to get it out and open it. That space has always been sacrosanct—what’s next? You’ll be rinsing dishes and putting them into the dishwasher? Please—where’s my real husband, and who are you really?”

He turned back to his computer with a smug smile. “CoTU, here. Where ya gonna hide my next present?”

I’m not worried. There’s still the vacuum cleaner closet.

Mixed Blessings

My definition of a mixed blessing is a woman with two washers and two dryers.The first time I conceived of such a luxury/curse was more than 20 years ago, when I heard a new neighbor had six children. My first words were, "Think of the laundry!" That's when I learned of her twin sets of Maytags.

Some people would worry about the grocery bills; others would develop a nervous tic just thinking about the cooking or the dishes. Not me. For me it's all about the laundry. There's a sign in my laundry room that reads, "When I Said I Do, I Didn't Mean Laundry." And yet I do ...Socks with sand ground into them, grass-stained pants and spaghetti-fied shirts appeared like thought bubbles over cartoon characters' heads every time I saw this woman and her Chevy Suburban full of kids drive by. High Tide, I thought.

Kids make clothes dirty in inverse proportion to their ages. For the math-impaired, this means a 2-year-old can get twice as dirty as the cosine of a 9-year-old, divided by the square root of your mother-in-law, and in only a small fraction of the time.

Laundry never goes away. As soon as the hamper is empty and every little outcome of your fluffing and folding is snugly tucked away, replacements materialize in the hamper, and they multiply. It's like a magic trick that the laundry gods play on us.Then there's the late-night afterthought, "Oh, by the way, can you wash these pants for tomorrow?" And that's from the hubby, not the kids - their survival instincts are better. Um, it's 9:30 on Sunday night, and you're just thinking now that you want these pants for tomorrow? With all the clean and pressed pants in your closet, it has to be the pair you have on? Sure, why not stay up late doing laundry? It's the way I most like finishing my weekends. (Sarcasm is just another service we provide here at Rubin House.)

Years ago I taught my kids to turn their clothes right-side-out and empty their pockets before putting clothes in the laundry. This was achieved easily, following two simple rules:1. Anything that entered the hamper inside-out was returned to its owner, clean and folded. And inside out.2. Gems, keepsakes and assorted detritus discovered in pockets could be claimed for a mere 25-cent charge. (These days I'd have to charge a buck or two.) Hubby, however, has had a full-time paying job (complete with pension), so I cut him a whole lot of slack in this area. I'm actually marginally grateful if two pairs of his socks see the inside of the hamper in a given week. Usually I have to gather them from the floor, either in his study or next to his side of the bed. When I marvel aloud about the treasure trove I've discovered, he defends, "But suppose there's a sock emergency; are you prepared like I am?

"What precisely, I ask, would a sock emergency be? Perhaps a naked guy with a towel wrapped around his waist rings the doorbell and says, "Excuse me, but my friends and I were just making a por - I mean a home movie, and I realized I'd look so much better with a pair of brown socks on." There you'd be to save the day?

"Good one," he allows."But why would you give him a pair of dirty socks?" I argue. "Wouldn't that be considered poor form?"

"Hypothetical guys don't need clean socks," he answers.

"But you're the real deal?""I am, indeed," he affirms. "My scattered socks and I are the real deal."I agree. But now I have a new definition of mixed blessing.