February 24th, 2026

Howdy do to all of you!  Happy Tuesday!

Yesterday, Monday, I was knee deep in laundry.  I do laundry every Monday. No sure why it ended up that way, but it has. And, as I have observed on many an occasion, either Tim and I are exceedingly dirty people or extremely clean people because Laundry Day at our house is a full day event.

​How on earth do just two people create enough laundry to make Laundry Day, well, an entire day?  Truth is, I'm not absolutely certain.  

I am rather particular about sorting.  Delicates are only ever washed with other delicates, dark clothes and light clothes are strictly segregated (the only time I ever approve of segregation) and even the towels are divided into whites and colours and washed separately.  Luckily the utility room is good sized so as to hold all of the many piles of laundry waiting their turn.

I've been accused before of being a Clean Freak when it was learned that I change sheets every week. To be perfectly honest, I would change them more often if it wasn't so time consuming!  I adore clean sheet night!  Also love using clean towels and I even throw the sink sponge into the laundry pile at the end of every day.  And by the way, I wear clean pajamas each night!  Yeah, I guess I am kind of a wierdo.

We also seem to go through a great number of towels each week. To be fair, we use tea towels (sometimes called dish wipers or kitchen towels) for things other than drying dishes!  I put one down on the counter for the clean hand washed dishes,  I sometimes use them a trivets for hot pots and pans while dishing up a  meal, or under a cutting board to soak up any spillage.  We use them as napkins, as blotters, as place mats and hand towels.  Somtimes I even dry dishes with them! Shocking I know.  

Clearly each of those uses (whether you agree with how we do it or not) means the towels is now dirty and off it goes to the dirty towel pile in the utility room, replaced by a seemingly endless pile of kitchen towels.

This time of year when it's chilly, we wear multiple layers of clothes, meaning bigger piles of dirty clothes and in the summer when it's hot and humid and we get sweaty just thinking about moving around, we sometimes change clothes during the day as what we were wearing has become sweaty and gross. Again, creating bigger piles of clothes.

I think we've solved the mystery of why it takes me all day Monday to do the laundry each week. Heh.  I honestly don't mind Laundry Day. It's not as if I have to haul it all down to the river and beat it on a rock after all. Once it's sorted, it's just a matter of putting things in one machine, pushing a button then transferring it to another machine and pushing a different button.   However, because I want to keep these endless loads moving forward in as timely as fashion as possible, I never allow loads, wet or dry, to just sit.  As soon as the load is finished, it's moving on to the next part.  Wet things into the dryer and dry things either immediately hung up, folded and put away or stacked in a neat pile and set aside for ironing later.  This means setting a timer and then, trickier part, listening for the timer to go off.

Sometimes I simply do not hear the timer. Which means that poor beleaguered Tim, who hears everything, even when he doesn't want to, has to endure listening to the repeated buzzing until it has driven him half mad whereupon he comes out, turns off the timer and tells me, "machine is done" before returning to his office. Poor Tim :(  I try very hard to not have that happen but hey it's not as if I'm just standing aroundm twiddling my thumbs,  waiting for each load to be done.  Heck no!  I'm doing other stuff between loads. It's called Multi-Tasking and we women are exceptionally good at it ;)

The first washing machine that I remember in my life was probably 60 something years ago?   Something like that. It was a wringer washer which was, at the time, quite the amazing machine!  We lived in California then and the washer lived in the garage. It looked a little like this:

As I understand it,  Mother would fill the tub of the machine with water and laundry soap of some sort, add the clothes and then plug the machine in.  At that point it would shimmy and shake, undulate and shiver until it had reached it's limit.  Then Mother would Unplug the machine, pull the drain plug to let the water out.  Then,  one item at a time, each piece would be fed through the wringer to squeeze out as much water as possible.  The first wringer machine was hand cranked, the second, wildly modern, was cranked electronically.  Mother was terrified by that electric wringer and cautioned Joy and I to keep our distance so that it did not pull our arms in and crush them! (coz you know we were definitely planning to feed our own arms in, fingers tips first).

Next up would be hanging the clothes on the clothes line. I cannot recall when Mother got a machine dryer but I know she was very excited about it AND the invention of dryer sheets. She used so many dryer sheets for each load that our clothes nearly oozed out of our hands when we tried to fold them. HAHAHAHA

I never owned a wringer washer myself, but I did have to hang clothes on a clothesline as a regular thing in my farm days when the boys were young.  I know my mother didn't enjoy it but quite honestly, I did.   I know that makes me sound even weirder than you already believe me to be (and I probably am) but I honestly enjoyed hanging clothes on the line with wooden pegs that squeaked a little each time I pushed them down onto the combo of fabric and clothes line. I can still hear it.

The first few items taken out of the clothes basket weren't just wet, they steamed in the morning air and they smelled delightful.  It didn't really take all that long to hang out a basket's worth at a time and it was peaceful outside time for me in the sun.  Later, in reverse, I would remove each item, give it a shake to snap some of the stiffness out of it, fold it carefully and place it in the basket. Every single tee shirt, each towel, smelled of sunshine and pine trees and whatever flowers were blooming that day.  And the fragrance stayed, it clung on even after it was hung up or tucked into a drawer. The aroma lingered even after being ironed.  I miss it.

Basically, of all of many myriad household chores, daily, weekly, monthly etc, one of the ones I truly do not mind is doing laundry. Even nowadays without the excitement of possibly crushing my arm in a wringer washer and without the scent of clothes hung on the line.

When someone says Happy Monday to me, I agree :)