My mom is an expert in the field of laundry.  Some may mock her skill and dedication, but if you have ever had the opportunity to benefit from her careful sorting, eagle-eyed application of spot remover and precise folding, you will quickly change your tune to one of appreciation.

I learned to do laundry by watching her (clean clothes were the drug of choice in my family)*, and while my style isn’t quite as scrupulous as hers, to this day I am the only one in the family whose folding measures up to her standards.  One of the tenets of my mother’s laws of laundry is that you should always fold your clothes as soon as the dryer cycle is finished, as you’ll rarely have to iron this way.  However, this does mean that you can only do laundry if you know you’re going to be home when the cycle is complete.

The last few days, I have been in direct violation of my mother’s laundry ordinances.  Sunday night, I took a load of laundry out of the dryer and let it sit in the basket.  I left it there overnight, as the clothes wrinkled and creased (I never used to be able to do this.  Even if I was dead tired, I’d fold that laundry before going to sleep).

Monday morning I unloaded all the laundry onto my bed, thinking that it would motivate me to fold it, but when it came time to go sleep, I tossed everything back in the basket.  Tonight I couldn’t take it anymore and I threw that wrinkled, mashed load of laundry (which was actually slightly diminished because I’ve also been dressing out of the basket for the last couple of days) back into the dryer with a wet washcloth, in order to undo the damage I had done by leaving it crunched in a wicker basket for days.   I also ran another load tonight, so I now have plenty of clean, unwrinkled, folded clothes (in a very limited rainbow of colors).

*Remember those anti-drug ads where the kid tells his parent that he “learned to smoke dope by watching you”?