The Laundry Quandry

Laundry. Let's discuss.

I am probably one of the few people who loves doing laundry. I like the routine and cycle (ha!) of it. I like watching my pile of dirty clothes become a pile of clean clothes. I love pulling warm, wonderfully fluffy towels out of the dryer and pausing just long enough to shove my face in them and take a deep breath before I toss them in the basket. I even love shopping for laundry detergent - when I worked at the grocery store, it wasn't surprising to find me in the cleaning aisle smelling all the new and exciting laundry detergent and fabric softener scents. I'd get all excited when it was time to buy new stuff and I'd wash everything that could possibly construed as dirty just so I'd get to have that new smell on my clothes (you know, so I wouldn't have mismatched scents warring against each other...can't walk out of the house with your top smelling like Tide and your drawers smelling like Gain).

One of my all-time favorite things is coming across the smell of someone else doing laundry - walking outside and having the Downy-fresh scent waft in your general direction.

Mmmmmm. Wafting laundry scent.

But...(and there's always a but, isn't there?)...I am positively allergic to putting the shit away. I'll sort it. I'll wash it. I get it dry come line or machine HELL, I'll even fold it. But I cannot, nay, will not, put in on a hanger or in a drawer.

Unless it's my son's clothes, and then I have no problem putting everything away in nice neat rows of mostly color coordinated but definitely sleeve-length segregated and jeans vs. khaki separated drawers.

I'm sure that in most relationships there is a yin to the yang, a partner who can take up the others slack. In mine, there is not. Hubs is equally incapable of returning cleaned laundry to its rightful place.

And so, the laundry sits. Folded in baskets and laid out for hangers, the clothes wait to be put away. They never stay this way - we go to find something, some article of clothing I know I just washed and, dammit, I know it's stacked on the right bottom side of the blue hamper - and instead of putting the stuff away while we look for it, we merely move it to the side, or on a chair, find what we need, and move on. At first, we might carefully put it back in the basket, but after a day or two we have a hard time making hide or hair of what's clean and what's not, until laundry day comes again and I'm sniff-testing everything on my closet floor because it's just a big jumbly mess and I'm out of empty baskets because they're still full of LAST WEEKS LAUNDRY.

It happens every. single. week. Once a month or two, we'll get a hair up our tushes and get everything sorted and put up, all facing the same direction on the hanger and his shirts sorted all "Sleeping with the Enemy"-like...but then our patterns slowly creep back and I end up as I was this afternoon, rear planted firmly on the floor among several piles of laundry (definitely clean, somewhat clean, OMG! That's foul!, and did something pee on this?) contemplating how much time and money I spend rewashing the same clean clothes every year.