Love in the Time of Laundry

I admit it, I can be tough to impress. I’m slightly allergic to flowers, and what doesn’t send me into sneezing fits invariably is consumed by the cats and regurgitated on the rug. This makes it difficult for me to see even the loveliest bouquet as anything but potential cat vomit. It’s a disappointing truth, but not nearly as disappointing as the amount of time I spend doing laundry.

If I were to hatch a get rich quick scheme, it would be to publish a map to the laundry hamper. If I wanted to become filthy rich, I would compile an atlas of how to get there from each room in the house. The piles of clothes I find everywhere reveal just how mysterious the laundry hamper’s location truly is. Amelia Earhart’s plane, Jimmy Hoffa, Atlantis, these are things that are just as hard to find as the actual designated muster station for our dirty clothes. This has been an endless source of frustration in my life, because it’s actually not that hard to find at all. It’s like Narnia (hint: IN THE CLOSET).

It’s not the washing, it’s not the drying, it’s the folding and putting away that makes me absolutely mental. There’s nothing like changing out the fitted sheets to make my head spin completely around.

WHY IS IT SO HARD? Argh. Grumble. GRRR.

In my single days, I would just make myself a burrito of comforter and say “Screw it!” These days that just isn’t an option, I need to actually be a grown up about bed linens and this makes me very annoyed. It’s worth it, but COME ON. Folding fitted sheets isn’t witchcraft, but getting all the mattress ensconced in sheet so the corners don’t pop up like evil eleventy billion thread count bamboo blend jack-in-the-boxes just might be.

Because I hate folding and putting away so much, inevitably clean clothes end up in a staging area other folks might call “a recliner”. It is fabled that other people who don’t use it to store clean knickers actually use this furniture to sit on. WEIRDEST. Safely stowed on this apparently-for-sitting furniture, my clean clothes gather wrinkles like farmers do their fall harvest. Then I do my best Taylor Swift impression and “Shake it off!” when I run out of stuff in my closet.

Imagine my surprise the other day to come home and find the staging area completely vacant.

There were clothes IN MY CLOSET.

FOLDED.

Can you imagine? It was like magic. I might grumble about the topography of laundry piles because nobody but me can find the hamper, but a stack of shirts without wrinkles is all I need to be really impressed. When it comes to love in a time of laundry, I’m actually pretty easy to please. Folded-clothes-hold-the-potential-cat-vomit-bouquet is the map to my heart, and you can get there from every room in the house (no atlas required).

(This post originally ran on Sparkly Shoes and Sweat Drops.)