The Laundry, it is winning.
Or, it was winning; let me back up.
We're a big family, and we get our clothes on the cheap, mostly through generous handers-downers, and thrift stores. This can lead to a Say Yes To Everything That Isn't Stained Or Holey policy, which, when you never stop having children, leads to a gigantic mountain of laundry.
You might say, "Launder your mountain, woman!", but why would you? Did you ever stop to think of how strange that sounds? Anyway, I did that. That's when it became a giant mountain of clean laundry on my bed. Here's where we get to the awkward business of folding and putting on hangers and placing into dressers and closets. I have no defense. I have done it, many many many many times, and I will do it, many many many many times, but on this scale, that solution is simply not an option. If the lives of everyone I dearly love depended on me effectively and regularly storing our clean laundry in little configured stacks, there would have been a massive Laszlo family tragedy sometime back in '05, when I became a mother of three, while simultaneously having enough clothing to dress a small army.
Then this little nut came along, with her thing for dresses, triggering everyone's desire to give me new pink flowery laundry.
Game: Over
Here was the scene each night: Geza and I finish watching a movie or TV, and head upstairs to go to sleep, but not before hoisting armful after armful of clean laundry from our bed to the eight, or so, empty laundry baskets, waiting in front of our dresser. When we need clothes throughout the day, we pick up a basket, toss it on the bed and paw through it, repeating if necessary, until we find what we're looking for. By the end of the day, most of the mountain is transferred back to the bed again, ready for another pre-sleep heavy lifting session.
I laugh, to keep from crying.
I make a duck face, to keep from laughing.
My problem wasn't that I could never get a handle on it. Just that I could never keep the handle. I WAS ALWAYS LOSING THE HANDLE!
Well, not anymore. I got X-treme. I spread a large flat sheet on my living room floor and collected every single bit of laundry, clothing, linens, whathaveyou, and piled it there. The only fabric in the house was either being worn by one of us, used as bedding, hanging from a curtain rod, in the process of being laundered, or part of my magical growing fabric pile, which is a blog post for another day.
I decided, we're going on vacation from this ludicrous way of living, and living in another, completely different, much more ludicrous way, temporarily. For two months we're only wearing a small percentage of our clothing. I "packed" a week or so's worth of clothes for us to use exclusively, put away the rest of what we all really like in giant storage boxes, and gave away the rest. Or tossed it, or reused it, or a little of both.
For sixty days, we'll live off of what I "packed," and after that, we'll go through the stored stuff and see what deserves to stay, and what is getting evicted.
We're about two weeks in and let me tell you, it's heaven. I scoop up much lighter piles of laundry now, and am so much quicker to switch out the loads in the washer and dryer, and fold and hang up and put away.
There's just one glitch, as far as I can tell: we can't find any of our clothes. Most of them seem to have disappeared. I was looking for pajamas for Mae the other day, dumped a basket of towels and socks on the bed, looked around, looked on the floor, in the closets, in the washer and dryer, and then, started to feel really stupid for hiding all of our clothes from us. I think I need to take another pass at things.
Nevertheless, I feel free. Sure, I'm sitting here in tights and a trenchcoat, wondering where all my clothes went, and who knows how far into this sixty days it will be before we find a shirt for Henry. This situation might take some tweaking, some getting used to, but I'll take it over living in the shadow of Laundry Mountain. Perhaps, at the end of this little experiment, I'll be in such a state of bliss at having abundant jeans and t-shirts again, I'll lovingly and diligently fold them into little shapes and store them in boxes full of sliding boxes, forever. Anything is possible in this crazy world of ours.
