Ordinary: Mega Load Express

My twice-handed-down washing machine serves perfectly for normal home operations, but an ill-fated boat camping trip into the first storm of autumn leaves me with sleeping bags in need of more gargantuan services.

So I find myself sharing a tiny-town laundromat with a grandma in white-and-yellow striped fuzzy socks. Quarters “chunk, chunk” into chutes. White suds jump-rope against the Mega Load’s porthole. Through an expansive window, roundly lettered LAUNDROMAT, trucks pass under newly-rinsed white and blue sky.

I reach for the cell phone to look up “chemistry of laundry soap,” but I have left it in the car. I will have to conjecture instead:

I see lab coats and goggles, the beginning molecular assembly of That Which Will Rigorously Clean; but around them also the memories of nature — tree and earth reminding us that, distantly, all things come from Here. 

I hear the churn of vast machinery, roaring out liquids, containers, lids — or is that the water dispenser next to me that randomly just started humming? Happily my mind wanders to water: Surely it enters this cleansing equation long before the marriage that is swishing through the lightly constructed weave of my jumbo mummy bag for all the delights of freshness, the sweeping away (to hide under some other rug) 30 accumulations of sweat and dust my content and uncomfortable body has shared with this blue polyester.

A 26’ Super Mover clonks against a curb as it pulls in to park. A pink-shirted driver stretches to access windshield smears with a blue rag. An early V of Canada geese announces itself overhead, unseen.

This is very little about laundry detergent, I think.

And yet, everything about it.

Soap! The great transferrer of grime! From someplace where it was correct and necessary (the ground, my pancake, dog, oak) it makes its way onto our bodies and their accouterments, where we find them annoying and unhygienic and determine to remove them via cleansing agents. And, I suppose, eventually back to the places they are useful.

The dog licks dust from her paws. The blackbird sheds it in a jewel spray of bird bath water. The 5-year-old wipes it on his mother’s shirt. The Mega Load Express sloshes it away beneath us. I carry home fabulously blue sleeping bags, light and lofty and ready for sleep.