Laundry Day

It’s morning in a small, quiet Midwestern town.  In a typical middle class neighborhood a family has just returned from a week long summer vacation.  The mom heads to the basement to begin washing the vacation clothes.

She tells her 4 children to throw their dirty clothes down the chute to the basement.  The clothes begin dropping from the ceiling, soon she’s ankle deep in clothes, she sighs.  Shirts, shorts, sweatshirts, pants, bathing suits, a shoe clunks her in the head….shoe?  “NO, not your shoes” she yells to the ceiling, but the shoes keep falling and the towels, so many towels.  How could there be so many towels she wonders, we were on vacation.  The lady suddenly realizes she’s waist deep in clothes but the onslaught has stopped and she thinks that’s all of them.  But it’s not, suddenly a literal downpour of clothes of biblical proportions starts falling.  The lady is finding it hard to move her legs, she reaches for the container of soap pods, her hand rummages around and she realizes in horror that there’s only 1 soap pod left.  The clothes keep falling, there now shoulder deep and she’s struggling to move, struggling to keep her head above them.  Finally the last clothes fall and she hears small steps on the stairs, it’s her youngest child carrying an armful of towels.

“I got a couple of towels to be washed” she says in her small voice, “I gave the doggy’s a bath but I didn’t do it in the bathtub, I did it in the kitchen.”

She throws the towels on top of the pile covering the lady and goes skipping across the basement humming.  “I’m going outside, have fun momma.”  Up the stairs she goes turning off the light at the top of the stairs.

“Honey, the light, no wait, honey could ya just help me for a second…anybody, anybody, I could use a little help down here.”

The lady’s in the dark, buried by a mountain of clothes with just one soap pod and it’s Monday