dirty no more

Just over a year ago, I confessed a dirty little secret in coming clean. 


I had succumbed to one of Mexico's luxuries: a laundress.


It was pure joy to drop off my clothes and have them returned clean, folded, soft, and smelling as if they had been spending the afternoon in an Alpine meadow.


When I returned to Melaque last month, I took a large load of terminally-smelly clothes to her.  And she did her usual great job.


But getting back into the cycle of living in Mexico means learning to deal with life's vagaries.  For me, a big one is laundry.  I hate it.  Rather than do it, I will suffer the discomforts of shopping.  As a result, I now have enough clothing here to go for almost a full month before I need to finally give in to washing.


That is where I found myself this week.  I was not at critical mass.  But I was approaching it.


For some reason, I decided to use the washing machine at the duplex for the first time.  Maybe I just needed to prove to myself that I still know how to do laundry.  Not likely.  I had been laundering my clothes in Oregon with no problem.  More on why that is a silly comparison later.)


And it was easy.  The washing, that is.  I simply put in the clothes.  Poured in the detergent.  And translated the Spanish instructions. 


All went well.


Then came the hanging out to dry portion.  I had a system at the old beach house of putting similar types of ropa together on the lines.  And there was plenty of room to do that.


Laundry hung, I went off to allow the sun to do its thing.


I gave myself a few minutes before I left for dinner that evening to fold up my freshly-dried clothes.  But, they weren't.  Dry.  The collars of shirts.  Waistbands of underwear.  All of the socks.  Vaguely damp.  Certainly not dry.  And certainly not ready to be folded and put away where they would be the perfect medium for another experiment in mold growing.


I had forgotten an important lesson here on the coast.  We live in the tropics.  Even though the day is hot and the clothes were almost in full sun, the humidity is high enough here that unless clothes are hung out to dry first thing in the morning, they are not going to dry in one day.


In Oregon, I had a huge dryer.  And no possibility of drying clothes outdoors in December when the humidity is even higher there than it is here -- and falling from the sky in large drops.


So, I left them out overnight.  By noon, they were almost dry.  To the extent that I had no more patience to worry about the future possibility of mildew.  Good enough was going to be as good as it got.


The lesson was a good one.  It taught me all of the arguments I learned last year. Turning my clothes over to the laundress is not really a luxury.  It is a pleasure.


One that I will avail myself of in a week or two.