I’m slowly starting to suspect that laundry is actually indestructible.
I’m slowly starting to suspect that laundry is actually indestructible.
I don’t really have any scientific evidence for this, of course. And I haven’t done any research into it either.
But I’ve now spent 60 years living among textiles and I think I have enough practical experience to draw completely useless, unfounded conclusions from this.
Because laundry never disappears.
It really doesn’t!
You THINK it does.
You put it in the washing machine.
Machine spins.
Laundry comes out.
You hang it up.
You take it down.
You fold it.
You put it in the closet.
Done.
Yeeeeaaah, right.
No.
Because while you’re standing there doing all that, new laundry has already appeared somewhere else in the house.
Nobody saw how.
Suddenly there’s a stray sock lying around.
For no apparent reason, there’s a towel hanging over a lamp.
There’s an item of clothing lying on a chair that nobody knows for sure is clean or dirty, so for the time being it has been granted independent status.
And meanwhile, a small textile community has once again established itself in the laundry basket.
I find that suspicious.
Explain to me why you never, ever actually run out of laundry.
You can have the laundry basket completely empty.
COMPLETELY.
That’s a rare moment that lasts approximately three minutes.
You look inside.
Empty.
Then you turn around.
And there’s another pair of underwear lying there.
HOW.
Who put that there?
Where did it come from?
Was it there just now?
Did someone get undressed at lightning speed?
Are they being produced somewhere?
At this point, I’m not ruling out the possibility that laundry reproduces.
Maybe at night.
That two socks meet somewhere behind the laundry basket and think: shall we start a towel?
That would also explain why you always have more laundry than clothes you can actually remember anyone ever wearing.
And socks are a separate case altogether.
You put two in the washing machine.
One comes out.
That shouldn’t be physically possible.
A washing machine is not a border crossing.
It doesn’t have a back door.
And yet socks disappear.
But at the same time, socks occasionally appear that nobody recognizes.
So somewhere, there must be an international sock exchange program that we haven’t been informed about.
Maybe there’s an entire underground network operating.
No idea.
I’m just asking questions.
Towels, by the way, are even worse.
You can wash all the towels on Monday and then, ridiculously enough, discover on Tuesday that once again there’s a load of wet textiles hanging all over the house as if you’ve been sleepwalking and… well… apparently doing laundry in your sleep…
Sounds a bit obsessive, actually.
And bedding.
I don’t even really want to talk about that.
That’s not laundry.
That’s a project.
Folding a duvet cover isn’t a household chore anyway, but a physical confrontation between a human being and a piece of fabric.
You start out full of optimism.
Five minutes later, you’re standing INSIDE the duvet cover.
How?
No idea.
But you’re in it.
Eventually, you shove it into the closet in something vaguely resembling a folded state and decide that, from a societal point of view, that’s quite enough for now.
And then you’ve washed everything.
Dried everything.
Folded everything.
Put everything away.
You walk through the house feeling satisfied.
Until you see a laundry basket somewhere.
Full.
AGAIN.
I genuinely don’t know how, what, who, where, but most of all: WHY?!
So my current theory is as follows:
Laundry cannot be destroyed.
It can only be temporarily relocated.
From body to floor.
From floor to laundry basket.
From laundry basket to machine.
From machine to drying rack.
From drying rack to chair because you can’t be bothered right now.
From chair to closet.
From closet to body.
And then the whole circus starts all over again.
So we’re not actually doing laundry at all.
We’re managing a circular textile system that we’re stuck with for life without our consent.
What the hell does this entire deranged laundry system think? That I’ve got all goddamn day for this?
Nope.
