Spring is right around the corner. And that means, so is spring cleaning. I like and want my house organized and clean. But because of a few minor deficiencies in my ability to properly use large appliances, my forays into spring cleaning often turn out more complicated than necessary.
Take last year's attempt at spring cleaning. I decided that I needed to wash the pillows. I chose this course of action one afternoon while washing our pillowcases and realizing that the naked, yellowed and stained pillows were creating an eyesore against the khaki green duvet. For my final load of laundry that day, I threw the pillows into the washer.
About ten minutes later, I heard a loud thumping coming from the laundry room. It's not that unusual to hear a bump or two in the washer, maybe from a heavy winter coat or a pair of Keds thrown in with a load of whites. But this particular bumping reminded me of those scenes in B-movies when everything is silent and all that is heard is the distant, rumbling footstep of an ominous creature approaching with painstaking deliberation, each thump causing a ripple in the lake or a shake in the trees. That's what my washer sounded like that afternoon.
I cautiously opened the door to the laundry room and felt the linoleum vibrate underneath my feet. The washer had walked away from the wall and trembled every time the pillows hit the bottom of the machine.
Curious as to how pillows could be so heavy to cause a washing machine to walk to the opposite side of the room, I tentatively opened the washer door and found that the pillows had metamorphosed into water-filled sandbags. I tried to wring them out but that proved futile, and I just didn't have enough upper body strength to hold up the pillows-turned-sandbags for the amount of time it required. So I threw them into the dryer with another load of clothes instead.
After an hour, the load was still thumping around at the beginning of the "More Dry" cycle. Worried about my excessive use of the earth's resources and my ever-increasing carbon footprint since my fateful decision that morning to launder the pillows, I opened the dryer and found the pillows stuck to the top, showering everything with water.
The pillows had burst like oversized water balloons, and all of the other clothes in the load were saturated. I grabbed the four pillows and ran into the master bathroom, a trail of water trickling behind me. I threw the pillows into the bathtub where they stayed for the next 24 hours.
It took a while for the rest of the load to dry, but eventually our clothes were wearable again.
Meanwhile, I made the bed sans pillows.
"You made the bed without the pillows?" my husband asked that afternoon. "What's the purpose of that?"
"I need some sort of consistency in my life, something in balance, something not as messy as those crazy pillows drying out in the bathtub."
Dan laughed at my philosophizing.
“I never worry about washing pillows because you just put pillowcases over them,” he said.
"Too bad you weren't here to tell me that a few hours ago," I muttered.
No comments:
Post a Comment