Columns share an author’s personal perspective.
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One of the best days of every summer is the day that my kids come home from sleepaway camp. This is followed by one of the worst days of the summer: the day their camp duffel bags come home.
Although I know that the camp does, in fact, do the kids’ laundry, you would never know it from the way the clothes look, smell, and crawl out of the duffel bags when they come back. Imagine the nastiest, most disgusting day your kids have in their clothes, multiply that by several weeks, add in the smell of a primordial cesspool, divide by the scent of decaying landfill, and you have the state of my kids’ clothes when they get back from camp.
Part of the problem is that the dirty stuff, the clean stuff and the damp stuff that had been hanging on the clothes lines all get crammed into the duffels together so that by the time they get home, they are radioactive. The other problem is that there is a 24-hour lag time between when the duffels get packed and when they come home, which if you know anything about growing microorganisms, is all the time that is needed to cultivate enough bacteria to take over the world.
This year there was yet another factor that made the whole event that much more revolting. The duffels were delivered in the pouring rain and left outside for four hours before we realized they were there. By the time we found them and brought them inside, the contents were so saturated we had to dump everything into the bathtub to drain lest we turn the laundry room into an indoor swamp. Had I been inclined to do so, I could have possibly had the basement designated a protected National Wildlife Refuge and charged admission for people to come in to see the ecosystem that was created by the combination of wet camp clothes and the insect life that hitched a ride back to our house with the clothes. But I was not so inclined. What I was really inclined to do was call a hazardous waste disposal company to come haul the whole mess away. But since I had spent a good chunk of money on the items formerly known as camp clothes, I thought it was financially prudent to at least try to salvage what I could, assuming, of course, the clothes did not rise up and kill me first.
Since I have been down this laundry road before, I had the good sense to send in an advance team to unzip the bags before me. Once the bags had drained in the tub, my husband, my son, and a small group of Navy Seals dressed in decontamination suits carried the bags down to the basement and unsealed the bags. A SWAT team was also on hand to flush out and capture anything that crawled, slithered or flew out of the duffel bags when they were opened. Finally, a group of specially trained experts from the CDC took measurements of the air quality at 15-second intervals to make sure nothing corrosive or biologically toxic escaped into the atmosphere of the laundry room. Once everyone had determined that the coast was clear, I descended into the basement to begin the actual de-campification of the clothing.
After I sorted the clothes into darks and formerly whites and started the laundry process, I went back to my office and came across something that made me realize there are some things that are actually scarier than camp laundry.
The camp bill.
This is a repeated Lost in Suburbia column, which has appeared in GateHouse Media newspapers since 2008. As Tracy Beckerman’s main column is shifting focus - her kids are grown and she has moved back to the city - we are rerunning her earlier work for readers who may have missed these the first time around. You can follow her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LostinSuburbiaFanPage/ and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tracybeckerman.
September 02, 2020 at 08:57PM
https://www.mcdonoughvoice.com/opinion/20200902/lost-in-suburbia-classic-column-day-laundry-room-stood-still
Lost in Suburbia classic column: The day the laundry room stood still - McDonough Voice
https://news.google.com/search?q=Laundry&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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