Call me crazy, but I actually like doing laundry. We have so many jobs in our lives with no tangible or immediate results, like parenthood. But a mundane job like laundry shows results. A clean shirt loses its barbecue stain or the chinos look nice again without the mustard splotch. I also like the smell of freshly laundered clothes. And, of course, it’s nice to have a choice when I’m tired of wearing those baggy sweatpants and the bleach-stained tee shirt.
But there’s one laundry job that has always made me crazy: folding. Folding those endless tee shirts and pairs of underwear are a total time suck, as the kids say. I could whip up a meal, clean a bathroom or dust the shelves in the time it takes me to fold them. After all that work, the kids would cram the clothes into their drawers and exit their rooms looking as wrinkled as a prune.
The hardest job, however, is folding fitted sheets. I know I’m not the only one who hates it, because a friend recently complained about it on Facebook and got 15 responses. They went something like: “Or you’re supposed to FOLD them? I just bundle mine up and throw them on my shelf.” My favorite was, “Oh, you mean you’re actually supposed to wash sheets?” Whaddya bet that one came from a college kid?
My mother tried to teach me how to fold them when I was a young bride. I listened attentively and even practiced a few times, but no soap, or actually, no fold. It seemed simple. Find a corner, then tuck the opposite corner inside it. Next find the other corners and tuck them inside the other two. At this point I had something that resembled a Halloween ghost costume impaled on my hand.
I flapped the elasticized corners and their row over the rest of the sheet and was supposed to fold that remaining large square a couple of times till it would fit on my closet shelf. Yes, it sounds easy; “sounds” is the operative word here. Today, after lots of sweating and swearing, I finally do what the Facebook person said; I just roll up the mess and cram it wherever I can.
Speaking of folds, how about those socks? I pair them, turn the tops wrong side out and stuff the feet into them. I’m told purists hate this method, since it tends to stretch the tops. I say, “I’ll buy new ones when they start to slump down our legs.”
Our Old School ancestors did these things and made them look easy. How did they do it?
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