The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: LAUNDRY

For 2019 I'm running a year-long series on my blog in which I share my responses to the writing assignment prompts found in THE BUTTERLY HOURS by Patty Dann.

I welcome you to join me, if you like! I've divided the prompts by month, and the plan is to respond to 3 (or so) a week. For some of these I may write poems, for others prose. The important thing is to mine my memory. Who knows where this exploration will lead?

For links to the prompts I've written on so far this year, please click on The Butterfly Hours tab above. This month's prompts include: hospital, hotel, humming, ice-skating, illness, kitchen table, knife, laundry, library, lunch.

LAUNDRY

The laundry of my childhood lives in stacks on the family room floor. With a family of seven, it seemed the washer and dryer were always rumbling. When the clothes were dry, Mama would carry them in a plastic basket to the family room, where she would sit in the floor and fold, creating a stack for each person. 

One particular memory: my very large father had very large tighty-whitie underwear, which looked more like dingy kites than something tight and white. Mama taught us to fold it in thirds – left side folded to the middle, right folded to the middle, then the bottom folded up, forming a square.

In my father's last years, when he was living alone in North Dakota, he didn't do laundry – he took it to a dry cleaner dirty, then picked it up clean. He seemed to see underwear as disposable – whenever we traveled together, he would just go to Walmart and buy a new pack of underwear for the trip. He also always bought a new pack of those traditional white handkerchief's and carried one with him everywhere. Those, too, I think, were disposable in his mind. Because his weight fluctuated throughout his life, he accumulated clothes in various sizes, not knowing which size he would need at any given time. 

Papa with his too-big pants.

The last time I saw him, one of the tasks of my visit was to help him get rid of some clothes (in sizes that he knew he would never wear again, as he had dropped a lot of weight in the last year of cancer). I was shocked by the sheer number of dress pants he owned – many of them never worn and still in their original packaging. (I suspect he forgot what he'd bought, and then he'd forget where they were, and then he'd need them right away, and so would buy new ones.)

My father also didn't do dishes, but that's another story!