A Public Airing of Dirty Laundry

(Val) Saturday morning at the Laundromat is not as busy as I expected it to be. Maybe it’s the warm, cloudless, blue March weather that has everyone putting this chore off until later, when it’s supposed to rain.

Maybe most of the regulars all have their own washers and dryers now and I’m the only one who is here because the wiring harness on her dryer fried like eggs on the hood of an overheated Chevy.

Maybe I just got lucky.

For whatever reason, I manage to find seven empty washers in a row and an open dryer for the load that had been halfway done before the dryer meltdown. Between the quarters I scrounged from the change crock at home and a roll from the bank, I’m hoping to have enough for this mountain of laundry. But at $1.25 to wash and .75 to dry (so far) it’s possible that I may be hitting up the only slot machine I’ll ever play – the change machine on the wall. At least I can rest assured that I will most likely break even. The odds are way better than they are for all those race fans out in Vegas this weekend. Of course, I’d rather be taking in the World of Outlaws, NASCAR Busch and Cup races than taking baskets of laundry into the Laundromat, but my time will come.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to do this, not since the last appliance failure a few years ago. The price has gone up, but I guess that’s true of just about everything. At least this time, I’ve got music to keep me company. Heaven knows everything’s a little easier in the company of Keith Urban, Jon Bon Jovi and Gary Allen.

The job goes fairly quickly, definitely faster than if I had done all this at home. All this laundry and I’m in and out in about two hours – a job that would normally take me a couple of days to get through. That’s the plus side of the Laundromat, I suppose.

As I wash, dry, check, fold and sort all these clothes, I make several observations. For one, Miranda Lambert’s Kerosene was intended to get a body moving and it takes sheer willpower not to dance around as I transfer clothing from machine to cart to table. Head bobbing is acceptable in public, but breaking into a spin move is better left to the professionals in the iPod commercials. Especially for a slightly overweight, 42-year-old, married mother of two.

Secondly, clean laundry is no lighter than dirty laundry, and thirdly, the van smells a whole lot better on the way home from the Laundromat than it did on the way there. My final thought is that washing clothes and going racing really have nothing in common, so I can’t even come up with a cute little anecdote to tie the two together. All I know is that the weather is perfect for a day at the track, and I would have preferred racing over laundry any day of the week. At least the NCAA Brackets come out tomorrow so I’ll have March Madness to fill in a few empty spaces on the sports calendar. (Go Jayhawks!)