The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: WASHING MACHINE

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 (final!) month's prompts are train, trophy, typewriter, umbrella, Vietnam, war, washing machine, widow, window.

WASHING MACHINE

our family -- with Ken II holding Goldie

The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear “washing machine” is “dryer.” That's because the first tragedy in my life involved a clothes dryer. We were living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and we had a yellow/orange tabby kitty we named Goldie. We all adored Goldie's playfulness and adorable antics. But one day when my mother went to pull the clothes out of the dryer, she realized instantly that something awful had happened. Goldie must have climbed into the dryer, and no one knew. That loss impacted my life in multiple ways, not the least of which is how obsessively I have and always will check the contents of the dryer before turning in on.