Mom's backyard. She loved sitting on her deck with her cuppa of a morning.
Anyway, laundry's done. I've been avoiding laundry of late, because it reminds me of Mom, and endlessly folding sheets and towels upstairs while our old Siamese cat, Beebee, scuffled under the sheets we were trying to lay out, "playing." Mom would scold her, and then ruffle the sheets and snap them out so they fell perfectlly even, requiring just a couple of sharp tugs to do hospital corners at the bottom. At this point, a suspiciously cat-shaped lump would be visible in the middle of the bed, so we'd stop to play with her for a bit before rousting her out of her cozy little hiding place to finish making the beds and folding everything else.
I've been letting my husband David handle most of the laundry duties for… quite a while, since before Mom died, but I've been pretty much avoiding it for sure since then. Mom spent a lot of her time doing laundry, hanging laundry on the clothesline, wondering if the weather would hold long enough so she wouldn't have to scamper out in the rain, or an Albuquerque red-sand duststorm, to get damp laundry in before it all had to be done over. She'd laugh hysterically can call herself " a stupe" for failing to notice storm clouds or hear the wind blowing a little too energetically.
Rileycat was the impetus for my Return to Laundry today, because he did a number on a pile of laundry in the closet. So after dealing with that and with his need for a nice clean kittybox, I just started doing load after load, and folding everything straight out of the dryer the way Mom taught me. To this day, it always bothers me at some level if towels aren't folded in thirds, because Mom had a thing about not having the selveges (the woven edges of the towels) meeting. I think that one had to do with her sister, my Aunt Florence, who was something of a tartar… okay, she was a stickler for domestic chores.
The funny thing about Florence is that she always had someone to boss around to do chores at the dude ranch they owned in Steamboat Springs, having an endless supply of college-age girls to train up in the domestic arts in what passed for the hospitality industry 60 or so years ago on the Western Slope. Mom came in for a lot of that, I think – Timmy will let me know if that's right or not. Anyway, a lot of Mom's ideas about housekeeping and cooking and kitchen accessories came straight from Florency; when we were in Utah last month working at the house Tim and I figured out why Mom always insisted on having a stainless steel sink when she had her kitchen remodeled. It was because Florence had stainless steel, restaurant quality sinks in the ranch kitchen.
Anyway, getting back on topic here… I also did a laundry run for the Northwest PADS shelter this week. This isn't so aesthetically pleasing, but it's a real feeling of accomplishment when you finally get it down, especially if forced to do it in stages due to my work schedule. Forgetting all the lessons I'd learned about how to gain access to the building and maneuver the balkey home-made cart into the tiny elevator, I struggled. At least getting in the building this time was easy – there was some sort of concert thing being rehearsed, but I did have to go around the long way from the front to the back just to open the doors for loading up.
I carried the laundry around for a couple of days this week, hoping to swap it at the local hospital for the clean sets. Balked at dropping it off the night I actually had a planning meeting for the new Holy Moly/St Nicholas website in Elk Grove, because it was way too windy and cold and dark by the time we got done. And yes, the irony of my comfort and warm home and car was not lost on me.
The new Holy Moly site, by the way, will be a completely different and radically welcoming design, baby. My spiffy new WordPress blog will be a small piece of it. We're very excited about it.
Anyway… I ended up going to the hospital to swap the sets during my lunch hour, always a risky proposition. As before and instructions to the contrary, there's no way to reach anyone by phone in the laundry area to arrange to be met and get help with the bags. At least I remembered the code for opening the automatic door. I didn't bother trying to find a cart – that's pretty fruitless, I've found, and I just dumped the full bags at the base of the ramp like the guys told me before. I ran out of time or it was way too late to drop off Thursday, so I ended up dropping off Friday before work, absolutely the last day it had to be done. The back door was already standing open, because the day care center was just opening for the day. 
