Love of Laundry

          A neighbor leant me Isabella Rosselini’s memoir Some of Me.  I  learned that her mother, Ingrid Bergman, loved to clean and instilled in her the same sense of how to do it properly.  For me, laundry is the domestic chore I like best. I remember the first time I washed my boyfriend’s clothes with mine. I was nineteen.  The intimate act of folding his long white socks was more meaningful to me than sex. I had had sex with many boys by then, but I had never washed their clothes!

          There are many levels of pleasure to be had doing laundry. First is the act of gathering.  Not all dirty clothes are in the tall hamper I bought when we built our house eleven years ago. Some are hanging over the end of the bed, or on a doorknob in the bathroom.  Hunting for John’s tee shirts takes me into his office and out into the garage where he’s flung them over half-finished speakers.  Some of his clothes make it into the laundry basket in his bathroom, which is a rattan waste basket that used to belong to Diane. So right there I’ve made a connection to two things I miss so much: my beautiful home and my beautiful friend.

          When we moved here, the dial on the washer that sets the water level on our washer broke off. Luckily it was set in the medium position. I never liked doing gigantic loads anyway.  I do one white load and one dark load every week. Most weeks I do a third load, on Laundry Day #2, which may be towels, or doggy blanket, or whatever is left over.

          My favorite part of the process is drying.  I have three drying racks. One is stainless steel, collapsible.  The other is wooden, collapsible. This I found on

Longview Lane East

on trash day and brought home. It’s perfectly good except some of the rods are bent. It too reminds me of “home.”  The third one was purchased with Blue Chip Stamps that we collected in booklets when I was growing up.  We also collected S&H Green Stamps.  It was my job, after returning from the grocery store, to put the stamps in the book. Originally the stamps came in sheets of small stamps and I’d have to use a sponge to wet them and stick them in.  But then they added bigger stamps and you only needed a strip of five per page which was more convenient.

          When the booklets were full my mother and I would go to the redemption store.  That’s where I selected the free-standing towel rack that I’ve taken with me every time I’ve moved since 1968. I use it now in my bathroom to hold my two white hand towels, which are what I use to dry off after a shower and to dry my hair.  My full size bath towel is hung over the shower just to add color to the room and keep out some of the afternoon sun that comes through the privacy glass.  I use the big towel when I take a bath and have to walk through John’s office to get to the tub.

          So, after a load of laundry has washed, one by one I toss small items into the dryer and run it on fluff, while I set up the drying racks. This removes dog and cat hair and takes out some wrinkles. Some items like bras or the wonderful lingerie Christina has designed over the years never go in the dryer at all.  When small items have fluffed I take them out and throw in the sheets.  Then my favorite part: arranging everything on the racks.

          Underpants hang from the four corners, socks line up neatly all facing the same way, small towels and tee shirts release fragrant moisture into the house.

          During the course of the day, items will be turned and rearranged and inevitably Audrey will show up and jump into the orange plastic tote basket in which I’d carried everything to the laundry room. This is the same basket I almost threw out after Amber died because I was afraid it would make me to sad to see it, she loved riding around in it so much. I used to carry her all over the house, all seven pounds of her. Now my fifteen-pound cat jumps in and takes up the entire space, her face pressed against one end, her tail escaping out the top. She likes to be carried too, but she’s so heavy I just give her short little trips to different parts of the house and plop her down.

          While I’m writing or eating or talking on the phone water is evaporating from wet laundry until it is completely dry, reminding me that nothing in life is static, although it may appear so at times.

          Making my bed is easier these days. Audrey is not into attacking the sheets as I toss them across the bed, as other cats in my life did.

Phoebe’s favorite thing was a sheet of tissue paper I’d place on the made bed.  She’d run and slide into it and rustle around on it. Every few weeks I’d have to replace it. She also loved Macy’s paper shopping bags.  I’ve kept one in her memory. It’s hanging in the laundry room with paper bags in it. Phoebe died in 1994.

          Tonight when it’s time for bed, I’ll pull back the covers to a sheet with no cat hair, drool or dead skin on it.  I will feel like a guest in a luxury hotel as I slip in my weary body and rest my head on a freshly fluffed pillow. I’ll open Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories to where I left off this afternoon at the gym, reading on the recumbent bike. I’ll let go of sweltering Texas in 2011 and travel back to Germany before

the war. I’ll savor the beautiful writing, which will cause me to pause from time to time to marvel at Isherwood’s craft that lives on in the printed word. 

Dreams, Memories

          I’m blaming the heat and my lack of work for what’s happening in my brain:

          Last night I went to sleep at 10:15 and woke up at 4:45. When the cat heard me stirring, she came out from under the bed, where I had occasionally heard her heavy sighs throughout the night.  I cuddled with her for a minute, remembering a dream in which I wore yellow socks and was mad at John because the floor of his room was so dirty the bottoms of the socks were black.  I laid awake until about 5:30. Then I had this dream:

          I dreamed I was in a house with white walls. It was hot outside. I thought I better close the sliding glass doors. I stood for a moment and thought, something’s missing. Walter! I’d left him outside in the heat. He was sitting by the patio door. I let him in.

          I turned on a big screen TV. A show about darling teenage girls was on. They had braces on their teeth.  I was sitting on the floor, watching the show and turned to Walter, who was now a  seventeen-year old boy. He had very black hair, cropped short, but not too short, about an inch long, it was thick and lustrous. He wore a long sleeved white shirt and white pants with a black belt.  He wore the latest style for young guys: a 1” wide black tie, like a very thick ribbon, tied in a stiff bow, with two long “tails.” He was absolutely adorable.

          He said a sentence with a made up word in it that started with a V. I knew it was not a real word but I got his meaning. He didn’t like living in a city. He missed the country.  I told him I did too.

          The outfit he wore was very much like what Tom Gray was wearing the first day I saw him at SMCC in 1968.  Tom was sitting, leaning against a sycamore tree.  He wore the white shirt, white pants, black belt, but also had a black vest and brown suede boot moccasins. His hair was medium brown, to his shoulders.

          I had gone back to SMCC with the intention of meeting “a guy” who would take me out of LA.  In January 1970 we left LA for Mt Shasta. Tom returned to LA a few months later without me, under the auspices of trying to get a recording contract.  I stayed until May 1971.

          I think the reason I’m stalled, writing my memoir, is that I’m not looking forward to writing about those years because they were traumatic and I made so many stupid mistakes.  According to Jane Fonda’s latest book, Prime Time, the last one-third of our lives should be spent reflecting on and coming to understand the previous two-thirds of our life, how we got to where we are, what we learned.

          I saw wonderful therapists in the 1970s and 1980s and thought I had come to terms with the mistakes of my youth.  But now they resurface. Now I have the opportunity to look at them with the added “wisdom” I’m supposed to have gained from my experiences since.

          We’ll see. So far, in writing my story I haven’t done much editorializing. I re-read the first few chapters today and found that the ones I like best are the ones in which one main event occurs, not where I cover several years at a time.

          So when I write about meeting Tom, I will have to describe my delight at finding that he was in one of my classes and how I casually  asked him if he knew where I could get some mescaline.  I’ll have to describe that tiny one-room cottage in Ocean Park where he first played Mozart for me on tinny speakers and how his body felt like an ironing board when we laid on his narrow bed.

          In the meantime, I look at my dog with different eyes. Of course I know he’s not a seventeen-year-old boy, but he is my constant companion. He delights when he sees me return from being out, or just from being in another room. Like a kid he’s excited when I ask him to find his squeaky. He brings it to me with bright eyes, anticipating what?

That I’ll steal it, throw it, roll it down the hall?  Or is what I call anticipation just pure delight that he has a squeaky toy and someone bring it to?  

BRAND LOYALTY

          Is it because I’m a Taurus that I place so much importance on brand loyalty? Does buying the same products year after year feed my need for security?  When I try something new I have a momentary feeling of anxiety - what if I like the new brand better? Or is my life just so boring that any change shakes things up?  I think part of it is this never-ending drought and heat. Watching lawns die was one thing but now that the leaves of beautiful mature trees are crinkling up and drying out two months before normal, I need something to distract me.

          So yesterday I went to Walmart. Walking down the school supply aisle I feel like I’m twelve-years-old again. I want to buy a new pencil box! But I have four already that are in perfectly good condition.  Oh, look at the cool new rulers! I don’t need a ruler. But I do need a new spiral notebook.  I can buy three-subject college-ruled or one-subject wide ruled. I want one-subject college ruled.  I choose two wide-ruled and have a tingle as I anticipate all the information that will be committed to these pages. When I get home I date the front and retire the April-August one to a nearby shelf.

          I pick up two packets of pencils: black for boys and pink flowers for girls. These are for the class I’m supposed to start teaching on August 23, a six-week program at Art2Heart dance & art studio. It’s been five months since I finished my program at Tom Daniels Elementary and none of the classes I proposed for summer panned out.  I hope I remember how to teach.

          But back to new things: for a long time I’ve watched TV ads for Garnier hair products.  I’m tantalized by the promise of shiny tresses, even though my hair is short now.  The reason I’ve never bought their shampoo is that I can’t stand the apple-green color of the bottles.  My bathroom has a beach theme with soothing blues and purples. True, I have a magenta towel, but that’s still a “cool” color.

          In the last few years I bought Pantene, in white bottles, until my nieces ex-boyfriend, a hairdresser, said it coats your hair with wax. I switched over to Dove, also in white.  This year I bought Clairol Herbal Essence because (1) I remember when my mother used to wash my grandmother’s hair in the bathtub, the first year Herbal Essence came out – it was dark green and smelled delicious, and (2) the new pale lavender shampoo smelled good.  But those Garnier ads kept calling to me.

          Not long ago I bought Garnier under-eye roller, which is a concealer with caffeine that’s supposed to diminish dark circles and puffiness. I don’t have a lot of puffiness but I’ve always had dark circles, which my mother used to say looked like “two burned holes in a blanket.”

          So, yesterday I broke down and decided to try Garnier shampoo.  There was a display at the end of an aisle – a sale! But the bottles were nearly quart-size, which would not do at all.  I was not ready to make that sort of commitment, plus I have weak wrists and could barely get my hand around the circumference of the bottles.

          Down the aisle I found smaller sizes and after looking at all the types of shampoo available – for shine, for curls, for thin hair, for dry/damaged hair, etc. I chose Triple Nutrition Fortifying Shampoo for Extra Dry, Damaged Hair.  The green apple smell is lovely.

          But do you think there was a matching conditioner?  No. However I found Sleek & Shine Frizz Defeat Deep Treatment, for Fuzzy, Dry, Unmanageable Hair.  I couldn’t smell it because it’s a foam and I would have had to take out the little stopper and press the top, then where would I rub it?  So I took a chance and bought it.

          When I went to bed I felt like I did when I was a little girl who had new shoes to wear to school the next day.  I couldn’t wait to slip them on and yet I felt sad that the smooth soles would get scratched up with wear.

          After my morning walk, which was unusually muggy and oppressive, I fed the dog, fed the cats, had a glass of juice and took a shower.  I inhaled the green apple fragrance as I squeezed shampoo into my palm. Too much?  Not enough? Rinsing, I found my hair felt nice and slippery, but I still had to put on the Deep Treatment and let it set for three minutes.  I turned down the water to a dribble while I washed and shaved my legs.

          And now, after a delicious breakfast and cup of coffee I sit at my desk with my hair air-drying, giddy with anticipation that I may have something new to love.

Lunch at Camp Verde General Store

            Yesterday I went to lunch with neighbor ladies, Dottie, Sandy, and Sue. They took me where I’d never been, to the Camp Verde General store, about a ten-minute drive out of town. 

            The store was established in 1857 because “army regulations prohibited the sale of intoxicants upon the reserve” -Ford Camp Verde. Four years earlier Secretary of War Jefferson Davis petitioned congress to appropriate $30,000 so the army could experiment with camels for army transportation and military purposes.  The bill was approved in 1855. In 1856 the first shipment of nine dromedaries from Egypt, twenty burden camels and four of mixed breed arrived at Camp Verde, with four native drivers.  A second load for forty more camels arrived the next year.  The third shipment, used as cover on a slave ship were turned loose to range the coast.

            When the civil war broke out there were fifty-three camels at Camp Verde. The fort was captured by the Confederacy in February 1861 but was recaptured by the U.S. Army in 1865.  The camels were excellent pack animals but when the war ended there were not enough funds to continue the operation. In 1869 the fort was deactivated but the store and post office continued to supply pioneer families.  The original structure was destroyed in a flood in 1910 and rebuilt.  In 2005 the new proprietors “carefully and conscientiously introduced a new spirit to this part of the Texas Hill Country . . . with spectacular outdoor patio . . . a front porch that invites you to ‘sit a spell’ and enjoy the day.”

            We certainly enjoyed our lunch – King Chicken, spinach salad,  pecan cobbler and iced tea  - only $6.77 each – in one of the high-ceilinged shelf-lined rooms displaying home made jams, body and bath products, kitchen items, art, candles, jewelry, etc.  When the weather finally cools it will be nice to go back and eat outside.  We plan to get together for lunch monthly, although Dottie will be returning to Colorado at the end of September.

            I’m happy that they included me. I love being with women. Conversation moves so easily from topic to topic. We always learn something from each other and about each other.

            A minor disappointment:  I won’t be teaching at Kerr Legacy Christian Academy. Turns out there are only fifteen students in the entire school; only three who were interested in working with me. I am willing to do it, but expect to be paid my normal rate, which the principal said the parents would not be able to afford.

            However, Lorraine has me set up to teach at Art2Heart, starting August 23 for six weeks. I have no idea how many children, or what ages will be there, as this is part of after school art/music program. But I’m game.

            Speaking of children – a must-see documentary Koran by Heart aired on HBO last night.  It’s fascinating.  Afterwards I read an interview with the filmmaker on Huffington Post. Shooting a documentary is so different from working with a script. He had to shoot tons of footage of many children who participated in the international recitation competition last year in Cairo, then edit down to cover the stories of the most fascinating kids and their families: boy from Tajikistan, girl from the Maldives.  We’re reminded that children are empty vessels into which adults pour information. Who would these children become if they were raised in America?  Who would we be if had been raised somewhere else?  My mind tingles at the thought.