I am very happy to report to my reader that two weeks after
my last post, in which I threatened to replace my husband with two Yorkshire
terriers, I am wearing a pair of black socks and a turtleneck laundered in our
brand new 2013 washer and drier. While I
am slightly sad about not having the terriers; they were to be named Ronny and
Esmarelda, I am ecstatic to see in person the truth about the mightiness of the
pen. The very day I posted my last blog
offering, he allowed me to drive him out to the suburbs to a mall, where we
signed off on a couple of machines teetering on the last day of a Black Friday
sale.
I, of course, am still at work, but he has just finished his
first full week of retirement, and thank heaven. No one had to give up a day’s pay to wait at
home for the delivery to arrive 6 hours after it was supposed to and he had plenty of time to install the shiny new machines. It took plenty of time. It turns out, according to him, that it
was not just a matter of slipping the old machines out, and sliding the new
ones in. Apparently it required re
constructing the apartment. I arrived
home every day to a scene reminiscent of a tornado-struck hardware store, with
sawdust, tools, weird shaped board feet of wood and duct tape rolls littering
the house. There was an awful moment on
the day before my annual dinner party, when he was musing that he thought the
new washer and dryer looked really nice in the living room.
To be honest, I wasn’t here for the sawing and banging and
swearing and frantic search for Bandaids.
I did get numerous texts about…well I don’t know, really, as he’s given
up his work phone and hasn’t figured out how to activate auto-correct on the
new one, but the liberal use of exclamation marks told me things were pretty
tough at the home front. At one point I
was under the impression that the long, meandering dryer vent was found to
never have been cleaned and was stuffed with soggy lint and the skeleton of a
plumber from some bygone era.
All I know is that last night he was excitedly sorting his
first pile of laundry . I had a black t-shirt
I wanted done.
“What colour are
you washing?”
“Vaguely darkish, underwear, that sort of
thing.”
I realize that the laundry has always been his domaine, but
still… I happened to pass the machine when it was done, and tried to sneak a
peak inside to see how wrung-out the cloths were at the end of a wash in a
modern machine..only because there were more than a few times with the old
machine that I’d had to pull out sopping towels and wring them out by
hand. My curiosity is
understandable. But he heard me. He leaped like a wounded stag out of his
lounge chair crying, “What are you doing? Don’t touch that! You can’t imagine
that I spent all week and gallons of blood installing them only to have you
touch them? Mine, Preciouses!”
At the end of that inaugural wash I was proudly presented
with tree pairs of near- white underwear, a black turtleneck and two pairs of
black socks. Some things haven’t
changed, at any rate. But I'm not going near the new machines.
No comments:
Post a Comment