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A laundry awakening

3 min read

Am I remembering this summer correctly? Didn’t it rain every week, and sometimes every day? Haven’t the farmers had a hard time making hay, the homeowners had a hard time keeping their grass cut, and the gardeners had a miserable time growing virtually anything?

Maybe that was just my experience.

That being said, it seems quite unlikely that my water supply would have dwindled to the point that I am rationing water, but that’s where I’m at.

We have never had to worry about conserving water in the past. We have a gravity-fed spring that feeds a large cistern, and when it gets full it simply overflows into the culvert that leads to the stream across the road. Conserving water in the house was a lesson in futility in that regard. I either ran it down the drain, or it overflowed. Either way, it ended up back in the ground.

But this week, I have been following my children around shutting off the water while they lather their hands and while they brush their teeth.

I even made the one girl shut off the shower while she soaped her hair the other night.

I know that others have it way worse than me. I know that the poor folks in Texas, Louisiana and Florida would love to have their home standing and have water conservation being their big problem of the week. I’m honestly not complaining here.

I’m just giving the backstory for my trip to the laundromat. It was my first trip to the laundromat in a decade or so. Maybe even longer, as my nearly-13-year-old son said he had never been.

We loaded our baskets, our laundry soap, and every quarter that I could find in my piggy bank. I also grabbed a few bucks in cash, figuring I could change them over if I needed to. Boy did I need to!

The last time I washed clothes at a laundromat, it cost a dollar a load. I was shocked that it cost twice that much this time. The dryers cost 25 cents for every five minutes.

My son, however, was not worried about the cost. He thought the laundromat was one of the coolest places he had ever been. He thoroughly enjoyed pushing the wheeled carts from machine to machine. He thought it was cool that the machines ate so many quarters (I can remember doing the same thing when I was a kid and my own mother was paying!).

He ran from machine to machine reporting to me which one was in which cycle, predicting which ones would complete first.

And then, when it was time to take them from the dryer, he happily folded laundry on the counter with me – why was that so much better than folding his laundry at home? – before helping me load the baskets back into the car for the return trip home.

Then he carried baskets into the house and took them to the proper person’s room. Without complaining.

I know that I don’t want to be without water for long, but I’m certainly not complaining about how helpful it has made my son!

Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@verizon.net.

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