Mount Laundry, Virginia, USA

My laundry pile was just proclaimed "Virginia's 27th Highest Peak" by Governor Kaine.  A stack of dirty clothes and linens so high, I should climb to the top and yodel.

I'm no mathematician, but shouldn't there be less laundry in the summertime, with the children wearing only shorts, tank tops, and sandals?  God help me, our dirty laundry is everywhere.

There's laundry in the bathrooms, in the bedrooms, and behind the living room door.  There's laundry under the sofa and on the front porch and on the back porch. There's laundry in the yard (because of kids stripping off clothes worn over bathing suits to play with the garden hose) and laundry in the van (muddy jackets and blankets from rainy baseball games).

Everything gets dirtier in the summer, and gets dirtier more often.  And not just the clothing, either.  The linens dirtied in summer in this house would try the patience of a saint.  Every hankie and 35 wash cloths are soiled once the paper towels are gone (daily, by noon), and then my resourceful rugrats raid the kitchen drawers for dishrags and cloth napkins.  Don't even get me started on towels--for swimming, for baths and showers, for mopping up spills, for sunbathing.  The children's bedsheets are revolting in warm weather all the time.  Bedding reeks even if I just washed it two days ago.

Even gathering up all the laundry in and around the Shoe is exhausting.  The resulting smelly heap is depressing.  No one woman can possibly wash, dry, fold, and put away this much laundry.  I want to go back to Great-Grandma's two-pairs-of-overalls method, or sign up for Nudism.

Oddly enough, whether I do two, four, or six loads of laundry a day, nobody in this house has any clean underwear during summer break.  Ever.  The underwear situation was the same last summer, so I think terrorists are kidnapping our underwear as soon as school lets out and returning it in August. I'd alert Homeland Security and get them on the case, only no underwear means a tenth of a load a day that I don't have to wash.  I don't mean to sound alarmist, but Laundrageddon is approaching. 

I am spending more on detergent, Oxyclean, Stain Sticks and dryer sheets than I am spending on meat and milk.  Today, June 27, 2009, the laundry pile has reached such a staggering, sticky, stinky height that I really ought to glue it together--unless there's enough mucus and popsicle drippings and watermelon juice to hold it together already--and make a sculpture to donate to a modern art museum.  I would call my masterpiece "Warning:  Fruits of Reproduction." 

Looking at Mt. Laundry, I feel like the last tzar of Russia when the guys with red flags showed up.  I feel like the dude in mythology whose guts got eaten by birds every day and then grew back every night so the birds could eat them again.  Basically, I feel kinda bummed out.  On days like this I walk into the laundry room and think, Oxyclean?  What I need is Oxycontin.

If I were filthy stinking rich, I would simply move out of my houseful of laundry and go buy everyone new wardrobes.  In summertime, I'd change addresses every other week. I'd pay the realtor or somebody to haul the laundry all off to Goodwill:  clean-but-unfolded laundry, dirty unsorted laundry, dirty sorted laundry, wet laundry moldering in the washer, and dry laundry wrinkling in the dryer. Then I would realize that I just donated several sports uniforms to Goodwill which the kids need for games, oh, like, say, tomorrow.

The kids would not be happy.

But their mother, wandering through my new house which is, for a few blissful hours, totally empty of textiles at every stage of the laundry process?  I would be ecstatic.

Then my son would look outside and say, "Hey!  Look!  A hose!" And his little sister would say, "Just a minute; I'm gonna grab a popsicle."