The Laundry Room

[Brown Eyes]

Thanks again Chrissi,

It's so exciting to have this resource!  Watch out Open Forum!  I many be posting up a storm with new visual observations!

On my computer the screencaps look pretty nice.  So, maybe it's a matter of adjusting computer monitors.  I discovered this the DVDs of BBM too... changing the "brightness" levels on my TV makes a massive difference.

[Front-Ranger]

I wonder if the metaphor of the sink, which we have been discussing lately, is related to the Laundry metaphor.

[Front-Ranger]

This is waaaayyy OT, so I'm only posting a link. But here is an essay from the Iowa Review called Laundry, which explores the task of doing laundry and its larger metaphoric meanings. I liked it, and I thought others might possibly find it interesting.

http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eiareview/mainpages/stanton.html

Friend, I just had the chance to follow this link, a year and a half after you posted it, and it's a fascinating essay about generations of a family from the POV of the laundry. The author is right: laundry is love!! Especially when you consider that her mother ended up washing an estimated 35,000 cloth diapers in her lifetime!!

[Front-Ranger]

Jack's washing machine was the middle of a roaring stream, and his laundry room was the great outdoors! In contrast, Ennis timidly rolled up his jeans when he had to wash out the coffee pot, but his laundry business had enuff of an effect on him to make him look up admiringly at Jack on the mountainside.

[Front-Ranger]

The Laundry Room is where it all comes together.

I was thinking just now about how Ennis tried to "wash everything he could reach", how he tried to clean things up, make things all right, all pure and simple and acceptable. Even during the last days of the story, he threw all the horseblankets from the Coffeepot Ranch into his old pickup truck, took them into town and washed them in the car wash. Before leaving town, he ducked into Linda Higgins' gift shop looking for a postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Linda was removing a sopping wet coffee filter from her coffeepot, throwing it away. She ended up ordering a hundred postcards of Brokeback Mountain, just so Ennis could have his one. That's how I remember it anyway. Your mileage may differ.

I also remember how Ennis stuck a toothbrush in his mouth as he was packing to go off with Jack on a "fishing trip". Pawing through the closet, he sniffed a shirt or two in order to determine if they were clean enuff to take with him. And Alma, until they moved to the Riverton laundromat, had had to wash his shirts at the sink on an old washboard. Years later, she would be at the sink with Ennis again, sluicing plates, and talking about his fishing with Jack. "That line hadn't touched water in its life" she said then. And it was like the water of Brokeback Mountain called out to "its domestic cousin" just then, bringing the transformative power of nature into that little kitchen, overwhelming Ennis and causing him to threaten her with the fire of a burning bracelet. She'd overstepped his line with her line about the line. 

After too short a time, it was Ennis who was on the washboard, bumping down the washboard road that zigzagged to Lightning Flat, on the welling prairie. Again, he visits a closet, again he searches for a scent remaining in a shirt. He finds only the remains of blood from a "gushing nosebleed" 20 years ago on Brokeback Mountain. Then, he finds the hidden shirt, his own shirt, "lost, he thought, long ago in some damn laundry." And he takes the shirts, takes them to his own closet. Through a few stinging tears, he says, "Jack, I swear--" as blood brothers do. What he did after that, we know little (Heath said "not much"), but we do know sometimes the pillow was wet, sometimes the sheets. Love is truly a force of nature, like the natural force of water. And like nature it is inscrutable, unknowable, inescapable, uncontrollable. All you can do is stand in awe before Nature's power and beauty and do what she compels you to do.

[Front-Ranger]

My first thought was: no way I would let you take pictures of my collected laundry mess. And then the sentence in blue: don't do my laundry! How true. My mother-in-law sometimes uses the chance to dive into my dirty laundry when she is at our house and I'm not there. I hate it! She knows it, I've made it cristal clear (and I'm not the shy type). But I guess that's just a typical mother-in-law thing to do: being annoying from time to time  .

Pardon me for responding to this after all this time, but this brings to mind an encounter with my own mother-in-law and laundry. My husband, my toddler son and I were at my in-laws house visiting, and we were preparing to go to a very ritzy hotel later that day (It was the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel). Just as we were about to leave, my son toddled over to the brick fireplace and bumped into it, gashing his gums and bringing blood. My husband scooped him up and handed him to me and I took care of my son's injury and comforted him, all the time with a diaper draped over my shoulder to handle the blood, spit-up, etc. While I was doing that, my husband took off his polo shirt, handed it to his mother, who rushed it to the laundry room and emerged a half-hour later with the shirt all washed and pressed. She handed it back to him and he put it on. Then crisply dressed father, goopy mother, and goopy son left for the hotel, and that's how we entered the hotel lobby an hour later!! No, they don't do it to be annoying, it's strategic, just marking their property!!

[Front-Ranger]

I love coming back to the Laundry Room every once in a while and just hanging out. Anyone understand this strange behavior?

[Front-Ranger]

Thinking about this tonight. These days I spend maybe 10 minutes every two weeks doing laundry. I almost miss hanging out in the laundry room!

Fortunately, it's also the cat's room, so I go in there every day to bring her food and fresh water.

[CellarDweller]

I love coming back to the Laundry Room every once in a while and just hanging out. Anyone understand this strange behavior?

I would guess it depends on whether or not there's someone in the laundry room with you.

I've used the laundry room at my building only once, it's $1.50 to wash and then  $1.50 to dry.

I generally take everything over to mom and dad's place and have lunch with them, catch up, while the laundry is running.

[Front-Ranger]

Oh, that explains a few things, friend Chuck! I was trying to keep myself from inquiring about how you seemed to spend a big chunk of your weekend doing laundry, and now I find out that it's your time to socialize with your folks as well. So, that is a very good use of your time. Me, I toss a mixed load into the washer and do other things while it does its thing. It has a buzzer which tells me when to transfer the clothes into the dryer, which takes about a half a minute. Then, another buzzer tells me when to retrieve the clothes and put them into my closet and dresser. Time spent: maybe 15 minutes, altogether, once every two weeks.

Between the washer, dryer, and cat accoutrements, there's no room for anyone else, so it's just me in the laundry room!

I wonder if Alma had to go downstairs to the laundrymat to do her family's laundry. Probably so, but that's way better than using the scrub board in the sink, like she had to do at the old lonesome ranch house!