The Laundry Lady

"Do you have anything to throw in the laundry?" my mom asks.

No, of course I don't. How could I? She just asked me the same question when she did the laundry an hour ago.

I am not exaggerating when I say that my mom is always doing laundry. It is what you might call a hobby of hers.

Living in a co-op building in Brooklyn, we normally share a laundry room with the other residents and are constantly collecting quarters to feed the machines.

Here in Hilton Head, my parents live in a rambling ranch house with a separate laundry room. It's a luxury that I don't have to shell out money to clean our clothes, but it's an added bonus that someone else does the laundry for me -- and even folds (much better than I ever could).

I literally can't keep up with my mom's laundry output. Before I get a chance to put our clean clothes away, she's already handing me more folded items to stuff in the dresser.

"This dress of Jesse's needs to be ironed," my mom says as she hands me a rumpled white hand-me-down frock.

And I ask myself, "when does a 7-year-old's dress ever need to be ironed?"