Laundry

While the dry season remains with us, it remains fairly easy to do ones laundry. You just take it out of the washer, wring it by hand, and then hang it on the rack. Once on the rack, it takes about 70 seconds to dry in the soaring Bali temperatures. Well, I exaggerate. But only a little.

From that point, after drying, the material has turned pretty much like cardboard and needs to be 'worn in' again. My wife and son's clothing goes for ironing. Mine, I just step into (which makes the standing cardboard quality rather useful), and then go about my day as if I'd just risen alive from a heap of variously colored material. We adjust to one another, my clothes and I.

I only mention it because today I'm doing the laundry and ... well, that's what I've got to talk about.

I forgot about the rinse cycle, where you drain the water from the load you've washed, fill the receptacle again, and add some 'softener' which has no affect whatsoever on the clothing. But it's the thought that counts. And an apparent irrepressible need to use water. I regularly see the neighbor watering his driveway profusely, and then, unappeased by this wastefulness, watering the street as well. But he does not water his dog, who seems to have been un-watered since the day of his birth. He used to be black, but now he's brown, wearing a coat of dust which follows him everywhere he goes, leaving little siftings of itself along the way.

Moby is his name -- after the dog that preceded him, who was white (like the whale, I'm assuming)) and died young under the wheels of a reversing SUV.

Moby II, the black one, has a skin disease which has eaten all the fur from his snout.

I remember when my mother used to hang laundry on the clothes lines that were strung between two T-shaped iron poles which otherwise served as chin-up bars for my brother and I. White sheets and pillow cases, shirts and summer dresses. They were like flags in the day and ghosts at night. She could not do this very often, for it is not very often sunny in Oregon. How she dried all these clothes during the rainy months I know not.