Super Wash

I’m waiting at the Super Wash in a yellow plastic scooped chair between a ficus tree and a dispenser of coffee in paper cups. The man who hasn’t stopped humming since he carried his first load of clothes through the back door slips quarters into the coffee machine and chats as his cup fills.

“Been coming here for years, twice a month. Decided we’d rather not maintain our own machines at home. They replaced the old coffee dispenser with this one—double the price but double the size. And do you know he spent $5,000 on new washers? Nice owners, from South Korea, always cleaning the place. The plants are a nice touch.”

I watch him quizzically as he chatters, wondering if it really is easier to go to the laundromat than do your laundry at home. And only twice a month? He is jovial, if not crisply clean—the type that seems unfazed by a washer broken for 22 days that no one can fix and seven loads of laundry to haul around in a Mini Cooper on a Friday night. 

I sort laundry memories while I wait. I’ll hang this one with the others, though the gray strip mall setting off Roosevelt Road isn’t as colorful as the rest. 

I remember Grandma’s stiff, worn, fresh-smelling towels, hung on the clothesline to dry. The farmhouse had a wringer washer in the back hall. Towels lasted for years and appeared crisp and clean, smelling of the Michigan outdoors and her garden. I loved that smell, though the roughness rubbed my tender skin raw.

I recall hiking through the Porcupine Mountains with fifty pounds on my aching back before my freshman year of college. We paused at Lake Superior to wash hair braided with leaves, army pants smudged with peanut butter, and bandanas stiff with sweat. Kneeling on the shore,  we scrubbed and thumped those clothes clean in the icy water, laying them flat to dry on the rocks.

Then there was that college summer in the Czech Republic, months after the wall came down. I washed and then naively hung my simple wardrobe outside on our ground floor apartment’s patio. We were gone for hours, trudging a road marked only by electric wires, unable to board the bus without the local currency. I came home exhausted to see an empty clothesline where my clothes used to hang.

In Bolivia we washed again and hung jeans in the hot midday sun. At 12,000 feet they dry and fade fast.

Seventeen of us shared a small washer and dryer that week in the Dominican Republic. After long days of mixing cement and playing with children with mango-sticky fingers, clean clothes were a treasure.

In Turkey, we washed modest clothes in tiny sinks and wore them again each new hot morning. I sympathized with the women wearing dark-colored burkhas from head to toe in the stifling heat.

With each memory and each pile of clean clothes, my gratitude grows. 

I’m back at the laundromat off Roosevelt Road. The joyful owners from South Korea have said goodnight to those of us still sitting in yellow plastic chairs watching clothes spin. The dryer buzzes and I end up leaving my iPad on the folding table, only remembering it the next day. When I return I am welcomed with four hugs. She has kept my iPad on her counter under a pile of clean clothes—turned in by an honest patron after hours. 

I realize I have all I need and I always have, even if right now I don’t yet have a working washer at home. And I am grateful.

Hope and Be.Longing