The Laundry Room Symphony

I was just checking a load of laundry downstairs- putting a lavender softener in with some baby blue sheets in the dryer, and letting a duvet soak in the washer- when all of a sudden:

I was five or six years old. My back was against the dryer in the laundry room at home in Monroeville, and my eyes were closed as I listened to the hum of thuds, and clanks, and tap, taps just behind the dryer door. It was the clanking and the thuds that made the metal door vibrate against my back. My mom was ironing my dad’s plaid shirt, and my brothers navy Tommy shirt, and my umbros. She chatted to herself, the hum of her voice as constant as the dryer’s. I opened the door, momentarily forgetting the feeling on my back, and took out several warm towels, and wrapped them around my shoulders and knees, still trying to sleep.  I sat on a hill of t-shirts, and towels, and linens; my foot on a sock, my hand on one of my dad’s t-shirts that had an airplane diving from the left pocket stright to the bottom hem.

 My mom was asking me to go get ready, to brush my hair, to get my socks and shoes on. But I was limp against the dryer, so heavy with sleep, and warm, and the smell of Tide detergent that I fell over just like a sock would.

I was just a sock on a stack of clothes, and I smelled like mountain breeze along with all the other threads and stitches. We were all sleepy and heavy, and obviously without any limbs in which we could put on socks or shoes or brush our hair. We wanted to sleep, to close our eyes in the darkness of the cabinets, and the drawers, and the closets in the house.

“Clink, Clink” My mom’s bracelets said, as she moved the iron back and forth. “Clink, Clink.” I heard them over and over, their tiny voices small, but resonant. They mixed with the humming laughter of the drying machine: its big belly rolling, and rolling, and rolling on my back.

“Shhh,” the iron said. “Shhhh, Shhh, Shhhh,” it said, as my mom steamed and steamed and steamed the creases and wrinkles out of my dad’s trousers. Where wrinkles were concerned, mercy was not. The iron may be an appliance in some people's homes, but it was a cruel weapon -at least if you were a wrinkle- in mine.

I opened one eye to watch her back. Back and forth she’d move with her arm. And her arm moved with the iron- that dictator of the laundry room whose hot face and fiery mouth could suppress those endless wrinkles. All the while, she was going over the grocery list in her mind, and out loud. And at the end of that list, she would begin another: things to do at work, people to visit after work, people to take food to, people she had met here and there, things to take to Granny and Bigdaddy, and of course, the most important of all, what we would be having for dinner than night:

Butter beans, corn, and okra from  Bigdaddy’s garden, meat loaf, and corn bread. And sweet tea that was so sweet, it was like syrupt.

List after list, like a morning bird chatting to the rising sun, she chirped and chirped to me, or maybe to the air, or maybe to herself. My eyes closed again, and I listened to her mind hard at work, chirping with the “shhh” of the iron, and the “mmmm” of the dryer’s belly, and the “clink” of her bracelets. And I was content, sleepy, but content.

I would do this every morning. Like a ritual, it was my snooze button. For years I would sit- my back against the warm dryer- on a stack of clothes. And I would listen to the music of the laundry room.

I don’t remember the last time I sat with her, maybe I was twelve or so. Sitting on the floor in front of the dryer was no longer practical about the time I realized that washing my hair in the morning was necessary, additional to attempting to do something with the tangled mess on top of my head.

But even so, just now, after having just leaned over the dryer, and feeling its warmth, I thought of her, my mom I mean. I thought of her, and the smell, and the sounds of the laundry room. And I remembered, like I so often do, a season in my life that was so sweet and good.

She always says, “We’re making a memory,” but she’s right when she says, “you don’t really know what you’ll remember until you’re older.”

I think the laundry room symphony is one of those things I will always remember. And perhaps, one day, I'll be the maestro wielding the steaming iron, and starting the dryer's laughter, so that a son or a daughter may rest their backs there, and spend the morning listening to me chirp while they drift in and out of a mountain breeze snooze.