Laundry and the Joy of Folding

I really enjoy folding laundry. Sometimes Fred will threaten to do it and I say, "No...please let me do it." I just like to do it right, especially the towels. I've even gone so far as to re-fold them when I saw that he'd done them. He said, "You think you fold better than me?" I said, Well...yeah."

When I was in the third grade, our teacher had the bright idea to suggest that we give one of our parents a gift certificate for Christmas. Most of my classmates committed to doing the dishes twice or weeding the garden once. I promised to fold towels for two months. Two months of folding towels for a family of five. And my mother held me to it. I had no concept of time. I didn't realize that it was going to be late February before I was paid up. But now I can fold towels like a pro.

In New York, I used to drag my huge bag of laundry across the street to the laundromat regularly and spend a couple of hours washing, drying and folding. I tried dropping it off a couple of times, but I didn't like how they folded. And they dried everything until it was crispy dry. I hate that.

In our house here in Amsterdam, we hang everything to dry. There's none of that realizing at noon that you'll need clean jeans at three o'clock and throwing them through the washer and dryer. It's the washer and then hang it to dry, which in the winter can take a long time - into the next day. (But you can hang things on the radiator and it will speed things up.)

I will even try to get to the washer before Fred so that I can hang the laundry. I have the way I like it done. Makes for easier folding. Plus, I'm very organized. It's bath towels, then T-shirts, then tea towels, then underwear and then socks are hung in the empty spaces. Fred just takes what's next and hangs it. How crazy is that?

I was a live-in housekeeper for two queens in Brooklyn for about nine months in the early Nineties. That was a ton of laundry every week. Piles of clothing and towels used once and thrown in the bin. They finally caught on that I was enjoying it and they didn't like that one bit. It was such a mess when I arrived. Piles of laundry all over the house. Masses of clothes in various states of being washed or dried. That's a story and a half. I used to race the clock to see how fast I could iron a shirt. I got up to an average of seven minutes per shirt. There I was making indentured servitude fun. Love that.

When I was in my apartment in Manhattan, I loved to spend an evening ironing and watching television. Not so much any more. I mean, I'm a great ironer. But now, I like to knit while I watch television. Time ironing is time spent not knitting and who wants their knitting time cut into?