Laundry
We spend Wednesday mornings at the laundromat. Our apartment complex charges too much to wash and dry so we choose to wash and dry elsewhere. Up until a few months ago we went to a 24 hour coin laundry down the street from the lovely Chateaux Versailles Apartments and right next door to a tanning salon. It always contained interesting characters.
The constant yelling of The Price is Right played in the background as women laid claim to limited folding table space. There were always people in the laundromat who wanted to claim a wheeling basket as there own. They’d sit in the plastic blue chairs with one hand on their chosen basket snarling at anyone who seemed to be looking at it.
It was sometimes fun to try to guess the relationship of the people who came in together. Once a man and woman came in to wash a heap of clothes. The woman was young and pregnant. The man was in his early sixties. Since they looked alike my husband and I assumed they were father and daughter until they started doing some un-father-and-daughter like things.
There was a couple that came in pretty regularly that always used Dawn dish soap in the washing machine. I’d watch the water, thick with foam, slosh around through their machine’s glass door and think, “At least they won’t have any grease stains.” I always wondered whether they were able to get all of the soap out of their clothes. There was a young couple that would use so much bleach that the laundromat would smell like a swimming pool.
For about a month, a man and woman (I don’t know their relationship because they hardly spoke to each other – probably just co-workers) used to back a pickup truck loaded with sheets up to the back door. They would pack every machine in the place with their sheets and take up every folding table and look at you as if they were daring you to complain. “Great! The eastern European sheet company is here again,” my husband would sigh as we walked in the door. No matter what time we tried to get to there they’d get there just before us.
Fortunately, we’ve found a new laundromat. It is clean. The machines are new and it has plenty of folding space. Usually, when we get there in the mornings, it’s empty. I miss the characters from the other place but the peace of mind I get washing at the new place is far more valuable to me.
