Basket Case
While sorting clothes the other day, I paused to reflect on my laundry basket. Yeah, I know. I rolled my eyes and sighed, too.
I was busy removing socks—pairing and balling them up before putting them in my bedside drawer—when I realized that this laundry basket is nearly on its last legs.
It’s about eighteen inches on each side, relatively small, made of a periwinkle blue plastic. I think it’s from Rubbermaid, but don’t hold me to that. Along the wide rim around the top, there are now not one, but two substantial cracks.
Although still quite usable, the cracks make the damn thing kind of wobbly when I pick it up without supporting the bottom with one hand. I’m afraid if I don’t, one of these days it’ll just split all the way down and fall apart.
You probably wonder, as I do, why I keep using it. I mean, it’s just a laundry basket, for crying out loud. They make them by the thousands, I’m sure. You can buy one on Amazon and have it delivered to your door the next day. And good baskets, too. Wicker, rope, you name it. Who knew that laundry baskets had gotten so bougie?
Certainly not I, although in my defense, I’ve not been in the market for one since 1989.
That’s when I bought the basket I own now—at the Walmart in Kirksville, Missouri, sometime in the summer of that year. Shortly after, I moved out of my parents’ home on the farm and into my first apartment in Iowa City, where I was starting as a junior at the University of Iowa.
I rented a small two-bedroom unit on Fifth Street in Coralville, a suburb of Iowa City that at the time was essentially a giant bedroom community for the student body. Park Place Apartments had everything one could need, including a pair of coin-operated washers and dryers just two doors down the hall.
So, along with a tiny black-and-white portable TV and a new toaster oven, I needed something to carry my laundry around in.
At twenty years old, I’d never before done my own laundry. Oh sure, I would sometimes help Mom by moving the wet clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. I’d even toss in a fabric softener sheet for good measure.
But that was about it. My first two years of higher education were spent at our local junior college, Indian Hills, so I continued to live at home and take advantage of my mother’s full-time laundry and dining plan.
Once I’d settled into classes and living on my own, I learned a great many things. Some of it was even useful in everyday life, although it was not typically picked up in a lecture hall.
I mean let’s face it—Boyle’s Law and all of that thermodynamics stuff might have been important on tests, but they got you absolutely nowhere when faced with the dilemma of getting Purple Passion stains out of beige carpeting.
One of the most crucial pieces of knowledge I stumbled upon during that time was the maxim “whites go with whites” and “darks go with darks.”
Another was—due to a rather inadvisable decision to toss a red t-shirt in with a load of socks and underwear at the last minute—learning to cope with the shame one feels while waiting at the bus stop in pink underwear. Oh, the eye rolls I got from Mom that Christmas when I took my laundry home to be done. Nearly four decades later she still brings it up on occasion.
And who knew you couldn’t wash wool in warm water? It was only later—as I fished a toddler-sized cable knit sweater out of the dryer—that I learned about these mysterious fabric Rosetta stones sewn into every garment called “care labels.”
I thought “dry cleaning” was what Mom did when she worked the bathroom carpets over with a rug beater.
* * *
As I looked at the basket sitting on my bed, I tried to recall when and how the cracks in the plastic first developed. It seems like they’ve always been there, but I know that’s not the case.
Maybe it happened when I graduated and moved to Des Moines to start medical school. As before, it proved endlessly useful, silently enduring load after load of soiled clothing and towels carted up and down the hall of my apartment building. I suppose that could have done it.
Or perhaps it was in 1996, when I was moving to Fort Worth to start my internship after graduating from medical school. By this time, I had a fat, spoiled gray cat who needed to make the move with me. If she was going to spend twelve hours riding in my VW Golf hatchback from Iowa to Texas, I would have to try to make her comfortable.
If memory serves, I stuffed the basket with an old blanket and made a nest for her in the front passenger seat. I can’t think that led to the plastic cracking, though. I mean, she was fat, but not that fat.
Then there was the move to Atlanta—and then later in 2000 to Johnson City, Tennessee, where I have practiced medicine ever since. I seem to recall using the basket to lug my wooden knife block and Mr. Coffee up two flights of stairs into my new apartment kitchen. That might have done it, but again I don’t remember.
And of course, I moved twice more while living in Johnson City, first to a larger two-bedroom townhouse. This was where I first met Sean—and where he later moved in with me when we got married. I always had a fondness for this place, not only because it’s where Sean and I first were together, but because it was my first apartment with its own washer and dryer hookup in the master bathroom.
I bought a Sears Kenmore washer and dryer set on a one-year payment plan for a grand total of 900 bucks and really thought I was living large.
My own laundry room!
No more lugging that basket along with a big burlap bag of dirty clothes to the laundromat.
No more rolls of quarters to feed into ancient Speed Queens that didn’t so much clean your clothes as beat them into sanitary submission.
Now I could just toss stuff in and press a button any time I wanted. I thought this must be what it felt like to be a Vanderbilt.
The laundry basket had its designated place right next to the liquid Cheer and Clorox 2, on a shelf that ran above the side-by-side washer and dryer. I tried to remember if it was cracked by then, but I just can’t bring it to mind. Oh well.
The final move (so far) has been into the home Sean and I have lived in for over two decades. These days, the basket is stored on top of the dryer, as the laundry room upstairs is a claustrophobic affair with little shelf space and barely enough room to turn around.
I continue to use the thing, though. Every week, the whites still go with the whites, the darks with the darks, and Sean tosses his latest bit of soiled clothing onto whatever pile the spirit moves him to.
I’ve brought this alarming practice to his attention many times—regaling him with the horrors of pink socks and sweaters shrunken to the dimensions of a garden gnome.
It falls on deaf ears.
* * *
All of this passed through my mind the other day as I paused for a moment in my sock-sorting reverie. I gave my head a little shake and looked back down at my battle-scarred laundry basket.
I really ought to toss it in the trash. It’s on its last legs—and I truly can afford to buy a new one. Maybe even a fancy rope one from Amazon. I’ve looked them up.
Jeez Louise, thirty-eight dollars? For a laundry basket?
That seems a bit excessive for something just to carry dirty underwear from the hamper to the laundry room and back again.
Honestly, the cracks aren’t that bad anyway. As long as I’m careful, they won’t get any worse.
Probably.
Besides, someone who’s kept the same wicker hamper he bought at Pier One back in 1998 is not the sort who’s inclined to replace a cracked laundry basket either.
I mean, come on. The hamper is so decrepit it sheds little pieces of itself every time I take the lid off and empty it of its weekly burden. At least the laundry basket maintains its structural integrity—more or less.
True, I probably shouldn’t use it to pack and move kitchen equipment anymore, but it’s still carrying clothes just fine—likely for many more years to come.
In fact, as I stand at the bedside sorting laundry—it seems to be carrying quite a bit more than that.
