Airing Dirty Laundry
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 28, 2014

My laundry is a showcase of my domestic shortcomings. A pagoda of clean clothes is stacked on the bench. Eldest son’s sports gear lies reeking on the floor awaiting fumigation. Suspended under the skylight is a dowel rail trimmed with dripping garlands of blue and white school uniforms. My husband’s favourite polo shirt, the lavender one with the chlorine stains, hangs damply off the door knob to the broom cupboard. A load of wet washing I forgot to hang out yesterday is crumpled in the washing basket, beginning to turn whiffy.

I am not a laundry-proud kind of person. My laundry is a sweat-shop that’s either stopped up with five peoples’ dirty clothes, or clogged up with clean ones. No-one but me ever puts anything away.

Of all the domestic duties that co-habitation requires, it’s the laundering that my live-in clothes horse takes for granted. Before bed, he unbuckles his trousers, liberating a roll of tummy. His fawn chinos drop to the floor. He daintily steps over them and untucks his business shirt from his underpants. He inspects his shirt front for soy sauce and coffee drips. Satisfied at finding both, he balls up the shirt and lobs it almost into the laundry hamper. Jocks and socks follow in alphabetical order. He knows it’s only a matter of time before these items of clothing will magically reap ear, spotless, back in his wardrobe.

On weekends, his gaudy, fraying favourites emerge from his chest of drawers. The burnt-orange tracksuit top is a permanent Saturday fixture. He usually teams it with the dung-brown trackie daks with a navy stripe and a saggy seat. These are the items of clothing that pass regularly through the laundry on their way to Bunnings, or to middle son’s soccer game. Another dad snorts in my husband’s direction: ‘Get dressed in the dark, mate?!” Later, after father and son’s obligatory post-match hot dog, I soak the tomato sauce stains out of the pants and dry the orange tracksuit top over a chair so it won’t shrink, because I know what love is.

My laundry is also a dumping ground for miscellaneous household items. I’m supposed to find a home for the secateurs, a container of ceiling putty and half a metre of air conditioning duct in case in case they’re urgently needed. I babysit an assortment of batteries (possibly live, more likely dead) lined side by side beside the washing machine. A lonely shin-pad waits for me to locate its mate.

On the highest shelf next to the dryer, I keep a stash of Allen keys. These keys sit atop an Ikea screwdriver kit, now on permanent standby after last week’s upstairs emergency.

In a huff, 13-year-old had stomped into his bedroom, slamming the c 1978 door. The outer door-knob flew off taking the spindle with it, and imprisoning teenager inside his room for forty minutes. (I congratulated the house for that stroke of genius).

I have friends whose laundries are more show-pony than work-horse. I don’t understand how their laundries operate with such efficiency. Even when I call in unexpectedly, their polar-white Corian benchtops are pristine. They must live in the nude.

When my kids are whining and husband is jet-lagged, I use the laundry as a safe-haven. No-one in my family expects to find me there. I make a start on folding t-shirts and re-uniting socks, but my mind is elsewhere. I fantasise about washing teenage son’s new black jeans with husband’s burnt-orange tracksuit and watching gleefully as the colours run. I peel a pelt of lint from the dryer filter and sweep up the gravel of spilled cat biscuits.

Yesterday morning, my husband was running late for a meeting and rummaging through the laundry clothes pile for his lucky lilac-checked business shirt. “This place is a sty!” he complained loud enough for me to hear from the bathroom. “Where’s that shirt?”

“I think your blue one’s dry!” I called back. He grabbed his blue shirt from the bottom of the stack, upending the pile. As he barrelled past me to get dressed in our bedroom, I braced myself for this month’s lecture. (He calls this talk a ‘minor marital adjustment,’ I called it a ‘blazing row’).

He swung open the bathroom door and poked his head around the corner, hopping on one leg to put a sock on the other. “We’ve been in this house for more than a year now,” he said. “Any chance you could get a system going in that wash-house of yours?”

Of yours? What a cheek! I was incredulous. Then furious. I bent down and retrieved yesterday’s purple socks and his lime-green running shorts. “Here you go!” I said, tossing them in his direction. “The laundry’s all yours. Let’s see how you manage in there!” And I flounced into the shower, grabbed the soap and got to work shaving my legs with his new razor.