Now that Tisha B’Av is over, we can finally do all the things that we couldn’t do for the past few weeks. We can go to weddings, and listen to music, and eat meat in the swimming pool… But mostly what we’re doing is laundry.
Well, by “we,” we mean “my wife.”
Not that I don’t help out around the house. I do. But my wife doesn’t really let me help with the laundry, because she’s afraid I’m going to mess it up. I don’t know how. What is she so scared I’ll do?
“Oh. Washing machine and then dryer!”
I’ve lost socks, though.
It wasn’t my fault. This happens to everyone. We get single socks back from the laundry, and we know we bought them in pairs. We didn’t buy one sock and then go from store to store trying to find another that matched it. And we also know that we took them off at the same time. We didn’t take one off on Tuesday and then other one the following Tuesday.
But laundry is always a big point of contention in our house, because my wife feels like she’s always doing laundry, and she partially blames me, even though I’m one person, and how much laundry does one person create? One person’s worth, right?
Wrong. Because I also tidy up sometimes, to make up for not doing laundry, and when I clean the kids’ room, I find a lot of clothes on the floor. And I have no idea whether they’re clean or dirty. So I throw it all in the laundry basket, because I figure that either it’s dirty because they wore it, or it has to get washed because it’s been on the floor. Because once clothes touch the floor, you can’t wear them anymore. It’s like food. Never mind that kids spend most of the day on the floor, and will cheerfully wear the same clothes for several days past the point where you’ve already told them that they’ve been wearing the clothes for several days.
But if I find them on the floor, they go in the laundry.
So I fill the baskets pretty quickly, and my wife is relatively certain that most of it hasn’t been worn for the past several laundry cycles, unless the kids are secretly trying on clothes in their room after bedtime.
But I don’t know what she’s complaining about. In the old days, women had to go down to the river and beat their clothes with rocks. (I don’t know that the rocks made the clothes cleaner, but they did slightly alleviate the stress of having to go to the river.) But my point is that they didn’t have washing machines.
On the other hand, neither do we. Well, we do have one, but it has this slight medical condition where, while it’s running, it makes a huge reverberating banging noise. If I had to guess I’d say it sounds like our washing machine is beating our clothes with rocks. So it might be on its last legs, because, near as I can tell, rocks are not good for the machine. And I’m pretty sure that, seeing as the day after Tish B’Av is International Laundry Day, our machine is going to have a nervous breakdown.
Sure, we’ve looked into fixing it, and we’ve found that doing so would cost about as much as getting a new machine. But which machine? So we decided to leave the washing machine shopping to my wife, and she’s been at it for a while. I’m not rushing her, because:
- A. I don’t use the washing machine, and
- B. I’m pretty sure than when she does buy one, I’m going to have to carry it down to the basement, which is not as easy as it sounds.
Why on earth do we keep these things in the basement?
So my wife has been looking for a while, and it turns out there are two washer styles—front loaders and top loaders. Our thought was to get a top loader, because that’s what we have now, and both our parents have top loaders, so apparently, that’s our minhag. Also, my minhag is to come at the washing machine halfway through the load and put in things we forgot to put in originally, and this can get very messy with a front loader.
Actually, it can’t, because front loaders have an electronic locking mechanism. So that’s another reason to get a top loader.
Except that my wife looked into it, and nowadays, just about all top loaders have this mechanism for some reason. And when she asked why, she was told it was a safety feature. I guess so no one climbs in in the middle of the cycle.
But how is staying locked a safety feature? What if someone’s already in there?
Of course, my wife’s main concern about the electronic override was: What if there’s a power outage? Because if you do laundry every day, and your washing machine is always running, the chances of that are insane. And she was told that no, you can’t get your stuff out until the power goes back on, but why would you want it anyway? It’s wet!
So my wife considered that really good news, seeing as every time there’s a hurricane, we seem to lose power, and one time it was for more than a week. It was like the Nine Days, but without refrigeration. So why not do it with no Laundromat option, and things growing in the washing machine?
So for now, we’re still using our old machine, because the clothes are coming out clean, and we can open the machine in the middle of the load to find out what that banging sound is. We can’t do that if it locks.
By Mordechai Schmutter
Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].
