Mt. Laundry...

My mom adores doing laundry.  It seems to revitalize her sense of purpose to go through the house and gather up lights and darks and get the machine humming.  I tease her for this when she comes to visit me and goes about washing every last stitch of clothing and linens we own.  By the time she's done, there is NO room left in a closet or drawer for one last sock or face cloth.  I tell her that we in the Forty-Five Degrees house maintain a delicate balance between clean and dirty clothes in order to have room in our bureaus and closets.  After mom leaves, I have to resort to re-organizing everything into compact double-folded piles in order to make everything fit.  It really cuts into my blogging time.  

I joke that so much of who I am as a domestic engineer is a direct rebellion against the tidiness of my mother.  I love her for her ability to look at housework as a daily "must" to be attacked with gusto as opposed to an arch-nemesis deserving of scorn and avoidance.  When Ethan started all-morning preschool last summer, I took a deep breath (or a million) and decided that if nothing else, our laundry was going to be done in a much more timely fashion than had been my habit from....well, forever.  

And I actually did it.  It was a burden at first, but eventually, running through the house every other day and gathering up everything that needed to be cleaned became in and of itself so much easier than watching the pile amass to something that met me at eye-level and taunted me for the week until I held my breath and dove in because we were out of underwear, that I started doing laundry 2-3 times a week.  Loads got smaller (and by smaller I mean I didn't need to do 4 loads of dark to get through them all or wish I had some sort of crow-bar and pulley system to get wet clothes out of the washer) and putting clothes away didn't mean an hour of mindless folding while incessantly asking Ethan to "please leave the clothes alone or mommy's going to run screaming from the house." 

The routine was working for us.  And I was feeling good about it.  Sure, every other aspect of my house continued to suffer from my lingering adolescent sense of rebellion against the cleaning practices of my youth.  When my mother came out to help me pack, even though there was no laundry for her to do except her own, it still took her a good long time to get the kitchen "really clean" as opposed to just my "it's not a germy cesspool" version of clean.  When my mom cleans, you could eat sushi grade tuna off of our kitchen floor and feel good about it.   But anyway, the laundry was going well. 

And then we hit a week before the move.  I was good at first and made sure that every single item of clothing we had was clean before packing it.  I packed three suitcases of clean clothes--one for Husband, one for me and one for Ethan.  The rest of our clean clothes went into Space Bags.  I bought some of those new giant Glad bag and labeled one: Dirty Laundry.  The Space Bags got packed in the moving truck and the suitcases and Dirty Laundry bag piled into our car for our road trip.  What an awesome system.  The idea was that when we got up to SunnyHappyTown  I'd have one big bag of laundry to sort, clean and put away with the rest of our stuff. 

So, I started that about a week before we left and we've now been here a week.  I haven't done laundry yet.  The giant Glad bag of dirty laundry?  Oh, it's full. And our bedroom floor?  Completely covered.  Ethan's room?  Oh yeah, that too.  I am suddenly thrust back months into the past, staring at that damn mountain of dirty clothes. 

I'm not sure what my issue is--sure I was stuck on the couch with the toe-of-death for a week, but that didn't keep me from unpacking a good number of boxes, hobbling from one place to another, taking long rests in between while the throbbing stopped.  It didn't stop me this weekend from making a trip to Target to buy Pull-Ups (oh, and a couple of cheap fall shirts because, hello, I don't have any clean clothes!).  So I really have no excuse.  I keep telling myself that as soon as I unpack the box with the laundry detergent in it, I will open up a can of whoop-ass on the pile of clothes (I know that phrase is outdated, but I will never stop loving the can of whoop-ass).  

But again, I've been to Target.  Where they sell, you know, laundry detergent.  Which would have cost me less to buy than the couple of cheap fall shirts.  But I opted for the shirts (duh) and Mount McWrinkle remains the menace of my bedroom. 

I do have to say, it is a testament to my former lazy-laundry ways that both Husband and I have yet to run out of underwear.  I do believe we've each got at least another week's supply.  I might have to pick a shirt out of the middle of the pile, give it a whiff and then let it hang in the bathroom while the steam from my shower unwrinkles it, but damnit, my underwear is clean.   So mom would be proud of that, at least, right?  Especially if I were to be in an accident.

So fine.  Now that I've admitted this relatively gross and off-putting tidbit about myself, you know that today on the way home from preschool we're going to have to stop at Target so I can actually buy some detergent, go home and do laundry.  And once I do that, I will of course, find the box in the garage that has our laundry detergent in it.  

Bring it.