My Laundry Has Special Needs

I miss the days when all my clothes went straight from the washer into the dryer.

In my 20s, the odds were good that everything I owned was either some manmade fabric that would serve as garments for the cockroaches that survived the nuclear blast that would take us all out of the picture or it was made of cotton and would get incrementally smaller with each washing/drying combination, eventually becoming bar clothes for toddlers.

But somewhere along the way, I learned that the dryer is not our friend.

I laugh, of course, and tell myself that the rough, air-dried terrycloth towels I use post-bath last longer, smell better having been dried out on the clothes line. People using their dryers! Why, I never heard of such foolishness! Don’t they know how bad that is for the fabric? That it causes shrinkage? That the wind and the sun can do the work for them?

Do they know how much money I’m saving not having that lousy dryer running all the time?

Honestly, though, without at least the suggestion of a breeze, the texture of those towels brings to mind burlap sacking, which makes me sad because from there my mind goes to burlap attire.

It’s a short trip in my head from one scenario to another, and in no time at all I am constructing burlap coverlets for the throw pillows and boiling vast pots of potatoes for dinner.

Somehow, rough clothes equals poverty.

Now, of course, I have sweaters that insist they be “hand washed”, which I suspect is a setting on the washer somewhere I’ve yet to discover. I have garments that insist on being laid “flat to dry”, which I believe is code for “over the back of a chair near the heater”. I’ve got two cashmere sweaters that I dare not eat in for fear of having to wash them. I’ve got slacks that are washed once every ten wearings or so simply because one never really knows, does one?, about slacks?

When did I become a slave to what my clothes want?

I’ve come to a sudden realization. If the tag on my clothes says "Do not machine wash or tumble dry", it means I will never, ever, wash it.

Great Scott. Think of the savings.