Wash Warrior

Have you ever stopped to think about how much of your life is devoted to taking care of clothing? If you added up all the hours we spend taking care of clothes, the number would be staggering. It would have been a whole lot easier if God had given us fur instead of skin.

My laundry problem escalated when we moved into a single-wide, one-bathroom mobile home; we bought a used one to live in while we build a house. The washer and dryer are in the hallway, next to our bedroom and the bathroom. I can’t wash clothes and dry them fast enough to keep the mountain of laundry low enough for my boys to get to the bathroom.

Add to that the fact that because our pipes weren’t well-insulated, they froze. You can guess what happened to the laundry pile—it turned into Mount Everest. So I loaded up garbage bags full of clothes and went to the Laundromat. When I was in college I visited the Laundromat frequently, and don’t remember it being nearly as exhausting as it is now. By the time I hauled it all in, found machines that worked, sorted, washed, and dried, I was exhausted and all out of quarters. My hat is off to weekly laundry warriors.

Today, I called a friend of mine who manages a Sears store. I explained my problem and asked him about a washer and dryer I’d read about: one that can handle twice as many clothes as the one I have now. He gladly described the latest model and highly recommended it, but he did have some words of advice for me when I told him we were living in a mobile home.

“You’ll have to make sure your trailer is really stable and anchored well. The spin cycle on the washer operates at 75 rpm.”

Should I chance it? Will 75 rpm be too much for a used trailer to handle? There’s only one way to find out.

“When can you deliver it? My boys need to take showers and we can’t find the bathroom.”

If the trailer rocks too hard and turns over, at least we’ll be clean and hopefully will land on a pile of laundry.