a clean start

If you ever come over to my house, there are some things you'd learn about me right away.  You would see that while my small TV looks  like it hasn't been turned on for six months, I have books and magazines everywhere.  You'd learn that I may be the only girl on the planet with only 10 pairs of shoes.  You'd notice that I really like folk music and that I should probably dust more often (or ever).  But in all of this hypothetical inferencing, please don't let the slightly-larger-than-average pile of dirty clothes in my hamper lead you to believe that I dread doing laundry.  

The truth is, I anticipate laundry day with a subtle giddiness reminiscent of the moments preceding an Easter egg hunt.  I use this particular analogy because we all know that an Easter egg hunt isn't always profitable.  Sometimes your spoils include those real-live hard boiled eggs that have been sitting in the sun now for a few hours and have recently been discovered by ants.  Or even worse, you get the plastic eggs full of some awful candy like black licorice or the large, cheap jellybeans that may have at one point tasted like something resembling fruit.  

But then there are those sweet, rarer finds like eggs with Reese's peanut butter cups or the good jellybeans (duh, the Starburst kind) or when I was younger, the ever elusive 'golden' egg that was tediously hidden and whose contents almost always included a wadded-up twenty dollar bill.  Twenty dollars is a lot of money when you're a kid whose major purchases have a $5 ceiling.  Heck, two decades later, twenty dollars is still a lot of money...for me, anyway.

So when laundry day rolls around, there is this moment, you see, that has the potential to lift my spirits to the skies for the rest of the day.  It comes at the end of the dryer cycle, when my clothes have been tumbling around in a whirlpool of air and warmth, when the buzzer sounds and summons me from my cozy spot on the couch where I've likely been reading some intriguing story, like the one I've been devouring this week about a guy named Eustace Conway who literally lives in and off of the wilderness. After I've removed my clothes from the dryer piece by piece, tossing them into my small white basket,  I take the lint catcher from the dryer, crossing my fingers, and if I'm really lucky, then I get to do it.  I get to peel that glorious, warm, blue-grey lint from the filter in one giant piece.  It only counts if it ALL comes off in one go.  There's no going back to clean up your work.  But when this happens, I can't even really describe to you, I'm just happy.  Perhaps I'm a simple soul.  It doesn't take much to make my day.  All I know is this: there are not many things in this world that come to such a neat and tidy end.  Things get broken and shattered and people spend all their lives cleaning up the pieces and working things out the way they want them, sometimes settling for a mug that has been superglued together, though it still looks much like the original.  Sometimes we get rotten eggs and cheap jellybeans.  But every once in a while you can go to your dryer and you can peel the lint off the filter in one swoop, and for that moment it feels as though everything has always been and will always be clean, fresh, simple.