We are back in Toronto, busy unpacking and setting our house to rights, a project that I fear may take us forever. We have too much stuff, a situation made clearer by our year of living sparely at Clare Hall.
We managed perfectly well without the detritus that fills our space here at home. Clutter, I guess it could be called, or memorabilia. As we unpack and organize, I find myself tossing things out left, right, and center. Flip-flops bought in Tanzania now chewed by the dog? Cozy sweater from Edinburgh's Greenmarket pocked with intransigent stains? Harris Ranch mug with a chipped rim? Begone.
The kids and the pets have made the cut. We're keeping them. It is very lovely having most of them close, and all of them nearer time-zone-wise (for the moment). And there are certainly some inanimate possessions with which we have had a happy reunion (books, art, coffee grinder, sofa).
The laundry room is one part of the house I am especially happy to return to-- in spite of the Everest-like pile of towels and linens. When I first learned that husband and I would be using a communal laundry facility for our year at Clare Hall, I quaked and hunted for laundry services in Cambridge that offered pick up and delivery. Impossible otherwise, I said to husband. I am way too old to put on shoes and coat and traipse through corridors in the cold and wet to wait my turn for a machine.
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| Barefoot laundering |
The reality, as so often, proved less daunting than I feared. Getting to the laundry room in Clare Hall did not demand rain gear; the route was covered. We rarely waited for a machine. Even when we did, the experience was convivial; sharing facilities with people you know and like has its pleasures. Nonetheless, washing clothes involved planning and time management and being dressed. One delight of returning home is the ability to do laundry unshod and unclad at any time of day or night.
But home laundry was not always so easy. When I first moved to England, way back when, I was shocked to discover that most washing machines lived in kitchens, under the counter, next to the tiny fridge, in exactly the spot where the (nonexistent) dishwasher should have lived.
"Why is the washing machine in the kitchen?" I asked my friend and housemate, Kate. She was bemused by my question.
"Where else would it go?" she shrugged.
Certainly not next to the dryer, which, like the dishwasher, did not exist in most houses (back then more so, but still even now). In Britain, I discovered, laundry is sent to try you. Convenience is less valued, to the extent that a desire for it is regarded with some suspicion. Laundry remains (in my experience) very much the province of the woman in the household, and cynically I cannot help but sense oppression. I may be wrong. (But I may not.) I also detect some brainwashing. My female friends often seemed to argue against their own best interests.
'Clothes that dry in sunshine smell so much fresher,' I would hear other mums say. Sunshine? What sunshine, I wondered, as friends abandoned trolleys full of groceries at Sainsbury's in order to race home and remove bedsheets from the clothesline ahead of a downpour. Reliable sun is a rare commodity in that green land. And what about the excrement of passing birds? Plus it takes forever to peg clothes, linens, and towels to a washing-line, where they dry hard as boards, requiring aggressive ironing -- another favourite time-consuming British (women's) pastime in which I declined to partake.
The first household appliance my husband and I jointly purchased was a dryer, at my behest. However I consented to a condenser-dryer, a device I have only ever encountered in the UK, which rather than being vented to the outdoors, collects moisture in a plastic tank that needs to be removed and emptied every couple of cycles. Yes, yet more work. We kept ours in a tiny upstairs room while the washing machine (of course) lived in the kitchen, necessitating an awkward upward trek clutching a basket of heavy wet laundry.
These condenser drying contraptions are only slightly less evil than the combination washer-dryers that satanic manufacturers foist on hopeful, unsuspecting consumers. Kate and I briefly shared one. It worked fine as long as you only washed one item at a time. I exaggerate, but not a lot.
My mother-in-law had a large house with plenty of unused space-- in fact there were whole rooms kept locked and untouched-- but still her washing machine (a washer-dryer) resided in the kitchen. She did own a separate full-sized dryer but it crouched at the farthest, darkest end of the detached and unheated garage. This placement necessitated toting a heavy basket of wet clothes from house to garage and then either slithering between the garage wall and the parked car, or first moving the car out to the driveway. It seemed to me that she had said yes to that dryer only grudgingly, while ensuring that doing laundry still constituted hard labour. The British way. Stiff upper lip and mustn't grumble-- which means there must be something about which not to grumble.
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| They're multiplying |
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| Getting there |
PS My research on laundry services in Cambridge did not go to waste; I shared it with a friend living in a different college, one with apparently very inferior laundry facilities. He was grateful.
