I’d like to think that laundry issues are a gender thing, but it might be just me. There are some guys in the laundry business who have been very successful, and I’m not sure if they are good businessmen or good laundrymen. Perhaps they’re both. I have struggled with laundry for quite a while.

Several years ago, Kathy had to have some surgery, spend a couple of days in the hospital and then lay low at home for a time. I was already cooking and knew where the vacuum cleaner was, so I figured I’d be fine when the dirty clothes piled up. I mean, how hard could it be? You put the clothes in the washer, add soap and fabric softener and you’re good to go. The machine does the rest.

First there was the issue of water level. A couple of times I had clothes that never got wet because the water was set on low and my clothes load was set on high. That worked itself out and by the time Kathy was coming around, I was the laundry ace. It’s my suspicion that if you are a woman and your husband is doing his laundry, you probably are not going to ask too many questions. That was the case in our house for quite some time after I became laundry man. Then one day, it happened.

As I was getting a load ready in the washer, Kathy walked into the laundry room and was not happy with what she saw. It turns out that the little clear cup that comes with the Wisk has marks on it for different sizes of loads. How was I to know? It was a cup and I filled it. Every time. No matter the size of the load, if I was washing, I filled the cup. That explained to Kathy why we had been using so much laundry detergent and to me why my jeans always smelled like Wisk. Once we had that situation ironed out and I saw the very faint lines and numbers that they put on those cups, I thought we were good to go. Not the case.

After some time had passed, again she was in the laundry room when I was washing and watched me put the fabric softener in the tub right after I put the detergent in. Now, in hindsight I realize that it doesn’t make any sense to put fabric softener into the tub when you start the clothes, but I had been doing it for a long time and T-shirts, jeans and underwear come out pretty soft just the same.

After a “how can you be so stupid” conversation, I learned that the hole in the middle of the agitator was for the fabric softener and it would dispense it automatically at the proper time in the wash cycle. Amazing.

Now, I’m pretty well checked out on this whole laundry deal. Years have gone by and when my clothes are dirty, I wash them. It’s all good.

Two things I want to mention here. One is that our laundry room is right next door to the bedrooms on the second floor. Both of our houses have been set up that way and if I had to go down to a basement or first floor off a kitchen, I would not have had the laundry success that I’m proud to share. Yes, we had one leak in 35 years and it wasn’t that bad and I fixed it. The second thing is that Kathy tricked me years ago into making a laundry bin that splits with my dirty clothes on the right and hers on the left. We’re not just talking dirty colored, now I have my own responsibility on my side. Clever. Very clever.

The details have been worked out over time and doing my laundry is just second nature now. I don’t fold and follow up the way Kathy would like, but she knows the alternative would be for her to do it, so she rarely complains. Sometimes I forget the clothes in the dryer and force an intervention, but that usually turns into a folding/hanging lesson when I see what happened to my clothes. Just when I thought I had it, another issue came up a week or so ago.

White clothes. Socks and underwear, mostly. Same stuff, different day. Proper detergent, proper water level, fabric softener in the hole in the agitator. All good. Into the dryer. By the way, we always clean the lint screen before every load and keep the vent pipe clean. Poor dryer maintenance can burn your house down. So, into the dryer go the clean whites. I set it for extra dry like I always do and just before bed, I get the clothes out of the dryer. The dryer tells me my clothes are dry. Machines don’t lie. The clothes don’t feel very dry to me, but who am I to question my dryer who has always told me the truth? Since I don’t need anything until morning I decide to lay the socks, T-shirts and underwear out on the ironing board until morning to see if they feel dryer.

After work the next day, we had “the talk.”

Kathy wanted to know why the clothes were laid out. I told her that the dryer said the clothes were dry, but they didn’t feel dry so I laid them out to dry more. It sounds pretty stupid now, but at the time, it made sense to me.

She asked, “If you didn’t think they were dry, why didn’t you put them back in the dryer?”

I said, “If they dryer didn’t get them dry the first time, why would I think it would do it the second time?”

I now understand the “Air-dry/Delicate” setting and the importance of checking that.

Kathy put my clothes back through and made sure that I understood that because they had been sitting out damp, she had to wash them again before drying them correctly. She got a big laugh out of the whole thing, I got a load of my clothes washed for me, and the laundry life goes on. I don’t envy those guys that make their living doing laundry.

PS. We now use those little laundry detergent pouches. You can bet a woman invented them so more men could do laundry correctly.