Some laundry room tips OR Seeing red in the laundryroom~ February 15, 1996

David Heiller

Doing the laundry had always been my wife’s job in our house, until her mother’s illness took my wife away for days at a time and I had to become the laundry person. Temporarily.
It’s been an interesting test, and one that I haven’t passed with flying colors. If any color comes to mind, it is red.

Rut-Roh!

That’s lesson number one in Introduction to Laundry: Don’t put a red bandana in with a load of lights.
Cindy always has two piles of laundry going in the laundry room, one white and one dark.

Even when all the laundry is done and folded, she’ll put out a call for dirty laundry, and a pile is scraped together from the kids’ room and under the beds and from the bathroom, where a towel that looks perfectly clean to me has been used one too many times. Cindy can tell these things.

I have never believed in the merits of separating darks and whites. And since the laundry room also doubles as the sewing room and the pantry in our house, I thought I could eliminate that extra pile of clothes on the floor and just wash them all together.
But one day I found that one of my favorite white socks, with the elastic still intact and no holes in the heel, had turned pink. I had washed it with a red bandana.

The red bandanna always made
the ensemble complete!

I like red bandanas. I used to wear them as head bands when I was in college. Then I wore them around my neck like a cowboy when I worked with horses at Camp Courage one summer. They work as pot holders and towels and wash cloths on camping trips. And there’s nothing finer than taking a red bandana out of your back pocket with a flourish that would flag down A. J. Foyt, and giving your nose a good, healthy blow. That’s living.
But just this morning our daughter, commented on the fact that her underwear, which used to be white with little flowers on it, was now pink with little flowers on it.
And there’s her formerly white T-shirt and formerly blue jeans, both that special shade of pink. So now I separate the red bandanas from the whites.

Stains are another interesting problem. Cindy had a pair of white jeans that were draped over the laundry tuba while back. That usually means they are stained, and require some magical treatment that only Cindy knows. I looked for a stain, but didn’t find anything, just some mud that had spattered on the back of a 1eg. So I washed them (with the darks, of course).

Mud was always an issue living in the country.
Here, David is digging Malika out of the frost-boil that had she sunk into, 
and could not get out of. I believe that she was minus a boot when 
she emerged, but I digress.

Cindy noticed they were gone from the laundry tub a few days later. “You didn’t wash my pants, did you?” she asked in a dread-filled voice.

“Yeah, why?”

“They were stained.”

“Yeah, just on the legs.”

“That was mud,”

“Yeah, mud.” Had she been walking around in an oil spill? It was mud; good, honest Minnesota mud.

“You didn’t dry them, did you?” she asked in that same tone.

“Yeah, why?”

“You can’t dry in a stain. If you dry in a stain it’s very hard to get out.” She emphasized the words “very hard.”

Sure enough, Cindy found the clean, dry, pants, and there were the Mud Stains That Ate Manhattan.

Luckily I hadn’t ironed the jeans. If you wash, dry, and iron a stain, forget it. Nothing has been made to remove such a stain. We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t remove a stain that has been washed, dried, and ironed.

The moral of this story is to avoid mud puddles and red bandanas. Better yet, avoid the laundry room.

Editor’s note: I never did get that stain out, and I never purchased anything white again. And David never did laundry again…