God is in the Details; Mom is in the Laundry Room

Or, uh...  maybe she's not...

I love this sentiment.  And I know perfectly well that it's true, but I have such a long time before I find it out for myself, it's more like a dream bubble.  Sort of like how I have a crazy notion that I'm going to drink a quart of lemon water and exercise first thing in the morning instead of drinking coffee and playing on my computer. It'll happen some day.

She says, "You're kidding, aren't you?
As if you had it hard, crazy woman?"

 It could theoretically happen.  (Sure it could.)

But, right now I'm having a dickens of a time with laundry.   Piles and piles of it, made all the worse because we have a pool and all the bathing suits and beach towels that come with it, make a constant, never-ending circuit through the washing machine.  Ugh.  Nice problem to have, I guess --  if you're a kid dropping your wet swim trunks and towel in the middle of the bathroom floor and expect a clean set to appear by the next day.  (Haha!  Get over it, kids.)  

But if you're me, it gets pretty tedious.  Especially living in this particular house, which has the "convenience" of a laundry room upstairs with the bedrooms.  Seems like a good idea, right? And maybe it is for some people; but it's not working for me.  The problem is that I don't usually hang around upstairs during the day.  The "action" is downstairs, so I go down there and just plain old forget about the laundry. I put it in the washer in the morning with every good intention -- and then promptly forget about it until the next morning.  When it is, of course, smelly and sour and has to be washed again.

Just this morning I finally succeeded in folding and putting away a basket of towels that I'd had to re-wash three times! The towels finally smell nice and clean but they're three shades paler than they were when they started.  I'm sick of the sight of them, and forgetting them every day three days in a row has caused a veritable laundry log jam.  I'm not sure if anyone in the house has had clean underwear for a week now.
(Don't worry, though...  It's not as bad as it sounds; people around here wear swimsuits a lot.)

Exactly!

So, the solution? Either I hang out upstairs more (ignore the children and type blog posts, right?), or set the alarm on my phone to remind me to run upstairs and change over laundry.  (Which will work if I keep my phone on my person all day -- something I seldom do, especially if I'm swimming...)  Or I get the children to remind me...  Ahahaha!  Yeah. Riiight.  Maybe if I remind them to remind me...

But what else can I do?

=sigh=  Maybe all  I can do is take heed of the meme.  I thank God I don't have

worse problems than forgetting about the laundry -- when so many people in the world still wash their clothes with rocks on riverbanks.  When there are folks who'd be delighted to do their own laundry, but can't because they're too ill.  When moms reach that time when they have almost no laundry because their children are grown and gone, and the house seems very quiet without the washer and dryer running all the time behind the sounds of their voices.  And there is nothing but the one meager load of clothes to wash twice a week or so, which they don't forget about because there's not much else going on in the house.  And, did I say it's quiet --  and lonely? And rather dull. But the clothes are always clean...

It doesn't change the irritation of always forgetting the laundry, or going up and down the stairs to tend to it, but when I imagine all the dirty clothes as symbols of a happy house full of active dirt-absorbing children, I have to agree:  even smelly laundry is a blessing.

Especially if it's smelly because I was hanging out with the children when I forgot about it.

(Still... Here's to figuring out a way to avoid doing that! Maybe memory supplements are in order...)