By Chris Broquet
(This is The Ripple Effect, occasional musings by the person who may or may not be the Blind Woodchuck. You never see them in the same room together, but the fact that there is a cicada mentioned is probably telling.)
The laundry room doesn’t really belong to me, but I pretend it does. My apartment is the garden level of a three flat, and my back door leads into this communal space. Sometimes I open that door to find other people doing their laundry, and I give them a wave and a smile and think welcome to my home, friends with smelly clothes. I try to remember to get dressed before I do this.
Since I have an hour to kill, I dump a hamper full of mixed colors into the washer and set it to Cold/Large/Medium. You can tell a lot about people from the way they wash clothes. I don’t worry about my colors cohabitating—I’m a liberal. The couple on the second floor always washes their sheets and towels without a speck of anything else contaminating the pristine whites. They are very nice, but they seem a bit like control freaks. The dude is very athletic and washes his running clothes separately every time he works out, which feels a little excessive to me, but then I don’t sweat much when I exercise.
The third-floor occupant is the landlord and owner of the building; she is also my sister. She will often text me to ask if anyone is doing laundry so she doesn’t haul her clothes down three flights of stairs only to find the washing machine in use. I am sometimes tempted to say it’s occupied because I might want to do a load later, but I never do.
Next to the dryer is a counter meant for folding clothes, and on it a stack of large boxes. My five-year-old grandson is a train aficionado (“It’s a tender, Grandma, not a tinder!”) and knowing this, my friend Jerry asked if I would be interested in his old childhood train set. I said, yes, please, expecting a few cars and some tracks. What he gave me was a complete set of Lionel electric trains with two steam-puffing locomotives, multiple boxcars, and a train station that whistles. Every box contains treasures that my railroad loving boy will adore, but maybe not until he’s ten or so. It’s very complicated and someone (not me) will have to set it up. So the trains stay in their original boxes wrapped in newspaper from 1966, and every time I see them, I think about when the tracks will finally wind around my grandson’s Christmas tree and the whistling station will announce the arrive of the steam engine. In the meantime, there is no room to fold clothes on the counter.
Time to switch stuff to the dryer. We have three large woolen balls that are supposed to be more environmentally sound than dryer sheets, but they don’t smell as good as Bounce.
Across the room from the appliances, there is a shelf full of paint from the last four decades. Much of it is useless, but you can see from the lids what colors were used in case you need to duplicate them. My sister is not a hoarder, but she has owned this house for a long time and it’s hard to remember which apartment is using one of the four different shades of ceiling white.
There is also a stack of miscellaneous boards: “in case we need wood,” she says. We rarely need wood, but this always reminds me of a story my father used to tell: one day he came home from school and told his mother this joke: “Why did they never let Polish people work on the demolition squad during the war?” The answer was “Because they kept wanting to go back and pick up the wood!,” which seemed very funny to my fourteen-year-old dad. But my Polish grandmother angrily responded, “We were poor people! We had to pick up the wood!” My father never told a Polish joke again. When I see that stack in the basement, I always think of my grandmother and how proud she would be that her granddaughters have saved wood.
The laundry room has an old refrigerator that used to be in my apartment and let me tell you there is nothing better than having an extra fridge. It’s usually full of seltzer and weird IPA beer that no one drinks and sometimes a turkey. My sister and I often cook a large batch of something (I do chili, she’s chicken curry) and then leave portions in the fridge for each other. The freezer may be on its last legs because it’s starting to make a shrieking noise that sounds like a puppy caught in an exhaust fan, but for now it’s great place to store decorative ice cubes.
People are often amazed when they hear I live in the same building as my sister. Some think it’s a great idea, but others roll their eyes and say no way they could do that. I have friends who won’t even speak to their siblings; it makes me sad.
It works for us. We trade off on snow shoveling and garden chores. It’s handy if someone needs a ride after an oil change or to get picked up from a colonoscopy. Sometimes we don’t see each other for days, but we have a Sharing Table where she leaves my letters that the mail carrier keeps putting in her mailbox and I share my library books —my longest running relationship is with the Chicago Public Library reserve list. And it’s not like we don’t have privacy—as the landlord, she does have keys to my apartment, but I have a chain I can put on the door to make sure she can’t get in. It hasn’t been necessary yet, but it’s good to know it’s there.
Also on the shelf is a large Plaster of Paris sculpture of a cicada that I intend to tile one day as a mosaic element for the garden. It’s been there for three years now and . . . dryer buzzing. Time’s up.
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This piece was published on Substack as part of a writing challenge called One Room, One Hour. The concept was to sit in one place for exactly 60 minutes and just write. It was really fun to scribble this stream of consciousness, plus I got my laundry done. You can find more pieces on this subject at the One Room, One Hour Substack, or visit The Blind Woodchuck and subscribe! (it’s free, unless you want to pay me in cicadas)
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