yobech505

In she walks.  Cool.  What is that?  Her laundry?  Egads and gadzooks!  That pile is huge!  Then, she sets it down next to mine.  Meter stick out.  Who’s is bigger.  Easy to measure.  And damn, mine is three quarters of an inch taller than hers.  Who gets to use the machine first?  Off to the basement or down the street to the laundromat.  It has to get done.  Cleaned?  Folded and put away.   

After it is washed, dried and folded, is it still our dirty laundry?   Does it still set a parameter for who we are, what we’ve become from the years of washing, wearing, folding and putting away?  How much of it have we thrown away, to no longer use?  None?  Some?  Only when it is so worn out that it doesn’t serve the purpose we purchased it for?  

Like that’s going to make a difference! How many of us, in our personal lives, can throw it all away and go scan our phone over the sensor at our local megastore for a whole new set of  garments that we will wear once or twice before they become dirty laundry?  How many of those carriers of laundry baskets can actually pay the price to dispose of the old and purchase the new with the intent to never be where we were before?  We don’t buy a different size than the ones that are worn out.  Often, we don’t even buy a different brand.  

Yes, I know, the body shifts distribution as we grow older, but the two afore mentioned situations are usually close together so we don’t get the big changes that online retailers try to convince us we need to do.  We purchase to replace what we wore out, not what we outgrew.  Herein, we have to consider; do we insist on the same eventual laundry pile we first stacked, or do we say, ‘I’m going to get rid of my dirty laundry and replace it with something easy to clean and keep, until I need to change it again for fear it will become very dirty laundry that, for some reason, seems harder to dispose of.

Is this a need for courage?  What is that, when it comes to dirty laundry?  The metaphor of a change of clothes taken from the dirty pile versus the clean one may not have the effect we need.  Move on to the new bags from the store that are sitting on the kitchen table where they were left right after an entrance.  Wear them.  Or do you wash them first, even if they come in a sealed package?  And, if so,  do you put them with the dirty laundry to be sanitized by an over advertised detergent, or are they separate?

It is determined by some, I surmise, that throwing away the once worn laundry as dirty, and purchasing new, even if washed prior to clothing oneself, every time, would be the equivalent of not having dirty laundry, at least for recycled wearing purposes.  The new would not be dirty, even if you did wash them prior to wearing them.  But once you take them off, they’re dirty laundry, even if you throw them away, instantly.  So how do you get away from dirty laundry?

Maybe you don’t.  Really, why should you?  It’s part of who you are and we all have it, even if we don’t necessarily change our clothes that often.  I suppose it is, at times, more imperative that we clean it up and fold it, put it in a drawer and pay no attention to what it may say about who we were, as if we used a strong bleach to change its color or threw in a cheap red t-shirt to unintentionally dye it.  Maybe we should just take out one at a time, close the drawer and notice the minor impact a garment, clean or dirty, actually has.