Other Homes, Other Laundries

 

When I think of my homes in the world, I differentiate them by how I do my laundry in each one.

In my current home in Tucson, doing laundry is quite pleasant. The machines are near the back door of the house, are clean and rapid, and involve only a couple of trips down a small staircase from my room to the ground floor. It’s as easy as taking a shower.

 In Seattle where I used to live in a century-plus-vintage apartment building, laundry was a matter of necessity coupled with a generous helping of squalor .In a basement room that felt like the ideal spot for a murder there were two washers and two dryers. In my bedroom near one of the windows was a long pole for clothes that shouldn't cook in the dryer. The only barrier I had to achieving clean clothing was having enough quarters for the machines, and my bank was only five blocks away. In this home, doing laundry was something never took for granted. At one stage in my life, I did my laundry in two plastic tubs, by hand, in my Bangkok bathroom, and occasionally had to gather it from the ground below when storms swept in, blowing my clothes from my balcony. Having a security guard ask me "Is  this your skirt?' in a language not my own isn’t one of the high points in my memory. For me, sharing a laundry with 49 other residents in my Seattle building was no problem at all.

 When I reached my Hong Kong home, the first order of business was buying a dozen plastic coat hangers, because my tiny Chungking Mansions domicile never had more than three hanging from pegs in the wall. Every four days, I carried a bag of laundry to a woman on the ground floor; if she received it in the morning, I could pick it up in the afternoon. And I did my best to get it soon after 2 pm, because if I hurried and put the laundered clothes on hangers, layering them on the four wall pegs, the humidity worked for me and I didn’t have to pay for expensive ironing. The most difficult part of this enterprise was being sure that I didn’t lose my laundry ticket, and having my day split in half by the need to return for that afternoon pick-up. I could of course have taken the local way out, washing my clothes by hand and hanging them out the window, but the thought of marinating them in the stagnant Kowloon air that smelled like wet mops made my laundry bill worthwhile. It was around $32 US per month and that was a price I was willing and able to pay.

 In my Bangkok apartment, laundry was a matter of charm and bemusement. Often the building's laundress had as shaky a command of Thai as I do myself, although the Lao lady and I always understood each other and the Myanmar refugee became much more fluent than I as the years passed. What was sometimes an insurmountable gap was our differing concepts of time and urgency. I always spent more money on clothing than I planned because most of my clothes were being held hostage somewhere in laundry limbo. But when they did come back to me, each garment was on its own hanger, beautifully ironed and presentable, delivered to my door. I usually paid around $38 US at the end of the month, plus the cost of the beer I used for self-medication when I realized that once again I needed to buy more clothes, since god knows when my laundry was going to reappear.

 All of this was still infinitely preferable to having laundry done when I was on the road. Punctual it always was, but what would return to me was always a matter of conjecture and sometimes consternation. Ironed? Unironed? Wadded into a clean ball? Would it come back before my check-out time? These were the questions that haunted me in a strange bed at 4 am. Suddenly the varying laundry methods of my different homes across the globe seemed comforting and luxurious, making me realize that familiarity breeds content. ~Janet Brown