Avalanche.

Yesterday I was in the basement doing possibly the 10th load over the last two days.  On one side of me was the clean laundry table, (piled almost to the ceiling), and on the other, the dirty laundry, which had been dumped on the floor, was almost up to my waist.  Avoiding the basement and pretending this problem didn't exist had not been the best idea.  And in my head, I was trying to blame Sam, who was always bringing laundry down, dumping in on the floor, and then coming back up with empty baskets, like he'd accomplished something.

"Did you move the wet stuff to the dryer?  Did you put a new load in the washer?"

"Yes," he always replies, and NO he did not do either of those things.

I get really fired up when I go down after a few days of him "doing the laundry" to find the same stuff sitting in the washer from a few days ago, which now needs to be rewashed because it smells funny.  What a waste of water, and oil to heat the water, and... Grrrrr...  Then I remember that I was protesting my plight and didn't just come down here to do it myself. My fault. My fault.

M and S diving into mountain of clean laundry.

        

So, there I was surrounded by clothes, and towels and sheets and blankets, and I just sat down on the dirty laundry and cried a little bit.  But doing that, just like avoiding the basement, was not productive.  My life will consist of doing laundry, all day, every day.  That's my life now.  I left teaching to do laundry...

Yet today, renewed with my purpose, I brought all the clean laundry upstairs and dumped it on the freshly vacuumed rug in our family room, ready to fold it all and put it away.  "I'm going to do this," I thought,  "Yeah!"  As I went up and down from the basement, one basket at a time, I felt sweat on my brow.  I have a terrible cold right now, and I was really feeling tired.  Whew.  My children were instructing me where best to dump it so they could jump from sofa to table to pile.  It's all still sitting in a huge pile, down there, although I feel like I achieved something by getting it out of the basement.

But now, I kind of want to cry again.  Because all of that fabric down there is a result of all the shopping I have done. Whether bargain buys or not, a lot of money was spent.  I look in my closets and think, How much do I need that money right now?  If I could undo all the shopping, I would.  I don't need any of it.  And I would have a whole lot more money, and a whole lot less laundry.