Mrs. Bailey Would Be So Ashamed

Monday, February 22, 2010
When I moved into a house in London, the landlady Mrs. Bailey had one specific request. “Just don’t go draping your wet laundry all over the banisters,” she said in her Yorkshire accent. “We don’t want it to look like a Chinese laundry.”

The house was equipped with a compact two-in-one washer/dryer combo in the far corner of the kitchen, the kind I’d learned to dread during my semester in Ireland. Despite making a noise equivalent to a rocket ship’s ignition every time it hit the spin cycle and despite sometimes keeping your clothes locked inside the machine for upwards of four hours, when the machine finally ceased its rocking and whirring, you often opened the door to find your supposedly dry clothes sitting in two inches of water. At times, Mrs. Bailey’s lighthearted command could be hard to follow. I resisted however, strewing my clean, but sopping clothes about my spacious room and over its teeny heater.

I don’t live at Mrs. Bailey’s anymore and although my current laundry situation is much more straightforward with a separate washer and dryer, clothes don’t always come out of the dryer completely dry. Andy’s been known to gripe a teensy weensy little bit when his multitude of polarfleece pullovers gain a musty smell from being folded and put away damp. So the last time I did laundry, I strung a rope through the hooks on the downstairs ceiling (perhaps there for this very purpose) to hang the obviously still wet garments from. Which is how the Shack turned into a Chinese laundry on Saturday.

Navigation proved tricky, but not impossible. Still, it left me longing for an outdoor clothes line and the smell of sundried clothes. The smell of Shack dried clothes is fine, but not nearly so nice.

1 comment:

  1. Whenever I travel in the UK and wind up with one of those two-in-one machines in the house, I groan. It takes about 5 hours to get anything dry.

    Many communities here in the Sates ban one from hanging clothes out to dry on lines, but more and more people are fighting it, saying it's more ecologically responsible.

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