Laundry on Sunday Night

Did I mention on my Thanksgiving Thankfulness List that I have a heated laundry room. Heated. Warm. Cozy. Indoors. It is not in a garage or a basement or on a chilly back porch or in a building at the far end of the back yard. Or worse yet in a Laundomat clear across town. I’ve had all of those at one time or another in my life. In this house my washer and dryer are in a room right off the kitchen that also houses the furnace! It’s a mud room/back porch with a built-in desk, loads of cupboards and shelves and, right in the middle of the floor, a heating vent that blows hot air up on the clothes on my drying rack (if I choose not to use the dryer).

This is the height of luxury for me. No hauling baskets of laundry hither and yon. No braving the elements to start a load. On a night like this…with a blizzard warning for my area, and road closures prohibiting travel anywhere, I have only a few steps to clean clothes.

My worst laundry situation was when I lived on Wild Pig Ridge and had to drive 50 miles to town to use the Laundromat. A close second was living in an apartment in San Francisco and having no car and hauling my dirty clothes in a pillowcase on the Muni to the Laundromat. No place on earth is as depressing as a Laundromat on a Sunday night when it is filled with steam and tired, lonely people.

There’s no real need for me to do laundry tonight. I don’t have to be at work in the morning. But old habits die hard. For so many years, Sunday night was the time to get ready for the week ahead. It was also the lowest time of the week with the weekend over and all those things you were going to do Saturday morning still undone. My memorable moments of sadness were always on Sunday night. Tonight I am not sad. I am glad to be safe and warm as the storm rages outside with my last load of laundry spinning on the last cycle on my nice heated laundry porch.