When my wife and I heard a plaintive whinny from our laundry room the other day, we knew that our old dryer had cycled its last load. The dryer had lasted three decades, long enough to tumble my daughter’s toddler clothes and her husband’s jeans many years later. We had gotten our money’s worth from an appliance we’d purchased as newlyweds, and I couldn’t complain when its bearings finally gave out.
Waiting for the store van to bring a replacement, I glanced at the old dryer, its top as rusty as an ancient freighter resting in dry dock. Before the kids grew up and left home, we probably averaged four loads a week, a perpetual spin of socks and towels, shirts and blouses, and the occasional dog blanket for a terrier whose bed was plusher than mine.
In the winter of 2000, we sometimes ran the dryer with nothing in it. Our newborn son, restless at midnight, found the gentle hum of the rotating drum a soothing lullaby. I held him near the dryer so often that I put a chair beside it, sometimes dozing off myself as the mechanical murmur put me back to sleep.
Why We Wrote This
When a decades-old dryer finishes its final load, a dad of grown kids reflects on the cycles of laundry it has completed over the cycles of his life, from young parenthood to empty nester.
In those cold, dark hours, the laundry room seemed like the gently beating heart of our house, and perhaps it was. Juice and milk often spilled over the family dinner table back then, flooding laps large and small like a river cresting its banks. Our youngsters muddied pants and dresses as they scurried around the lawn, their knees and elbows still marked by the yard’s wild embrace when they came back inside. Grass stains and blueberry blotches colored their clothing as brightly as a canvas by Monet. Our washer and dryer, always full, greeted us each day like rumbling horns of plenty, the sweet floral scent of each warm load perfuming our den with a subtle grace note.
Grace, though, isn’t what I usually felt as I fed armfuls of boxer shorts and T-shirts into the dryer each week. I came to think of myself as a sailor shoveling coal while our household slowly steamed its way through the seasons, our destination not always clear.
Laundry and other humble routines of parenthood sometimes made me restless, and I’d sigh and hope for a day when I might be able to focus on higher things.
But some wise words from writer Kathleen Norris helped me keep things in perspective. As she deftly noted, to call a household chore “menial” is to evoke a Latin word meaning “to remain” or “to dwell in a household.” In this way, Ms. Norris pointed out, the tasks we often regard as domestic drudgery are really “about connections, about family and household ties.”
It’s something I’ve reflected on more deeply in my new life as an empty nester, with our daughter and son now grown and living far away. Our washer and dryer are quieter these days, but when our children return for visits, we once again do their laundry in a small gesture of homecoming. The simple chore is a reminder that, in washing their pajamas and folding their slacks, we’ll always be ready with a warm welcome.
As the dryer spins, I’m reminded of the circularity of my life, its predictable cycles perhaps seen most ideally as a source of discovery rather than dullness. “The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation,” Ms. Norris told readers, “are walking, baking bread and doing laundry.”
Which is why there might be nothing nobler than a batch of clean clothes. Or so I told myself as I opened our new dryer and pitched in its first load.
