Obsession

My personal housekeeping struggle is with laundry. It tends to pile. Dirty piles upstairs in my bathroom and in L’s hamper, and clean piles downstairs, after I’ve dumped it in the sunroom to fold. Once folded and transported back upstairs, it piles in my bedroom because putting it all away requires a measure of devotion that is sometimes hard to muster.

For a long, long time, I never had all our laundry clean at one time. The laundry room floor was usually ankle deep with clothes, and we tolerated it. Then a couple of months ago my wonderful mother-in-law washed every stitch of it while we were out of town, and my wonderful mother helped me put it all away. I’ve stayed on top of it pretty well since then. I’ve been thinking about laundry today, and I realized I wanted to recommend a couple of books:

One that’s been a huge help and influence to me is the excellent Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, by Cheryl Mendelson. She is a true philosopher of the house, and a lot of the book is about the meaning and psychological stakes of housekeeping, along with a totally encyclopedic how-to approach. I highly recommend this, whether you have a lot of chores to do, or just like to read about them, especially chapters 1 and 2, “My Secret Life” and “Easing into a Routine.” Her chapter on bedrooms is called “The Cave of Nakedness.” It will change the way you think about the place you sleep. It will also give you a horror of dust. Seriously, this woman hates dust.

To find another book like this, you have to go back to the great domestic manuals of the 18th and 19th centuries, like Mrs. Beeton’s. In this period, Mendelson says, people knew without question that “happiness depends on good housekeeping,” an idea that seems “quaint or odd” to the contemporary mind. Consider, she says, all of the people in Dickens whose faults and virtues are indexed through the appearance of their homes. (Here is this blog’s second shout out to Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House.)

Some things this book says have become part of my internal dialogue, like, “Living in your home constantly uses up its good things—food, clean clothes, linens, shiny floors. Housekeeping routines provide for their constant renewal” (20). I often think of this, ruefully, when I’m cleaning. I guess the defining nature of a chore is that even while you’re doing it, you know it will have to be done again, usually soon. But when the going gets tough, I think of another of the book’s declarations: if people in your house have clean clothes, clean beds, and a clean place to prepare food, you’re doing well enough.

Mendelson has now written a book called Laundry. It too is very good. I haven’t read the whole thing, but one big take-away for me is that I am much more militant about sorting the clothes into loads by color. I always did darks and lights, of course. Now I have:
Whites (can be bleached and washed in hot water)
Mixed whites (includes patterns or stripes)
Lights
Reds
Pinks (my eyes have been opened about separate loads for reds and pinks!)
Brights
Mediums
Darks

The upshot of all of this is that I sometimes find myself obsessing about the exact composition of a load. When the dryer lint is a clear, true color, like pink, instead of a nasty gray, I feel happy. I do know this is crazy.

Right now I am building a small load of reds, and I don’t have quite enough to run the machine. Hank is wearing a red panda shirt that Betty brought him from China. That thing has enough dye to turn a river red. I am eyeing it and wishing he would get it dirty. Maybe if I give him PB&J for lunch? Because I’ve decided when he takes off the shirt, the red load is a go. I'm kind of excited.