The other night my A.C. was doing what it does best- randomly deciding to half-heartedly wheeze a meh level of cool into my room, while simultaneously relieving itself through fast leaking drops all over my floor.
Clearly the two are related, and perhaps if it took some time out of mildewing my floor to save it up and blow out freezing air it could be more efficient, but I’m not an air conditioner in a boiling hot country so I guess I’ll refrain from judgment.
What I do know is that I, in my infinite (exhausted, short sighted, not wisdom) wisdom decided that I should park my aforementioned laundry basket of gross under those drips. I figured hey, I need to wash this stuff anyway, this is easy, it’s just a slow drip, it’s all good.
I woke up the next morning to a completely soaked basket that was not “all good”, because it had been abused all night by ever increasing drips. As I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear, A.C. drippings are not sweet smelling. This reminds me of swamp coolers- Texas poor folk, anyone else?- and how you had to spray them down with the hose to cool them off.
This also reminds me, speaking of foul water dripping from things, of how I, along with my cousins would… wait… I don’t know if I can admit this… okay, yes I can. We would lick the swamp cooler drippings. Sometimes… we’d collect it in cups. Which, yes, we drank. With gusto. Like it was a delicacy.
A simpler time
I know. I know! It’s so gross, but it’s hot in summertime in Texas, and the water from the hose was so hot it could make a nice cup of tea come mid-day. Swamp cooler water was, no surprise, cooler. Anyway, I’m clearly not brain damaged and neither are my cousins so we’re all fine.
The upside of all of this is that, in a symphony of factors conspiring to make me productive and thwart my legendary procrastination, my A.C. drippings soaked basket of clothes demanded to be washed immediately, unless I just wanted to give the entire thing up to mildew. I own approximately not very many clothes at all, so my usual laziness was thwarted by practicality (the same practicality that justified not washing for a very long time, I have to add).
Finally, the entire bundle was washed, twice, in hot soapy tap water (which, let’s get real, probably isn’t much more clean than A.C. water) and that burning sun seared out anything else that might have been dirty. Every single piece of clothing I own is now simultaneously clean. Some of those things lurking in the bottom have been languishing for months, knowing that their bottom layer situation was a dire purgatory, trapped under the ever churning top layer of “Okay, maybe this one’s fine…”
Dear reader, not a single one was ever fine. But at least I’m finally fine. There were a lot worse things than dirty clothes in my life most of this year.
Originally written June 4th, 2014. I forgot to hit publish on Blogger then. It’s published now, for better or worse. Did the world need a rumination on dirty laundry, broken AC’s, procrastination, and confessions of repulsive childhood rituals? Who can say. It’s here now, y’all.
