My superpower won’t change the world, but it changes the way my family faces each day prividing a calm centre in a chaotic world
Recently, I easily manoeuvred my car into a tight spot, and my friend was impressed. I suggested that I only had two superpowers: Parallel parking and laundry!
Mom spent a lot of time in the dingy basement laundry room at the bottom of the concrete exit stairwell. The walls were never covered with plaster or drywall. The window never opened completely, and even if it had, my mom wasn’t tall enough to reach the clasp without dragging over a step stool or ladder. The floor was also concrete, eventually covered with an oddly shaped and weird, mustard-coloured piece of camouflage-patterned rug, which originally lay in the back of my boyfriend’s VW van.
The Laundry Goddess designation also extended back another generation to my mother’s mother. When I was a small child grandma still used a wringer washer. She filled the tub with water and added detergent and other cleaning agents such as bluing, which helped keep whites at their whitest. It also kept her little West Highland White Terrier as white as snow. I found this whitening process even more miraculous than the clean clothes.
I don’t remember mom teaching me the intricacies of the laundry room. I learned to fold towels and small garments as a youngster. I spent many hours ironing clean cotton handkerchiefs and pillowcases. But the washing wasn’t part of my training. So when I left home and moved across the country, stain removal required an expensive long-distance phone call home. I had to quickly describe the offending stain and write down the recommended cleaning products and removal process.
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