Dirty Laundry

On Sunday nights, I join most of my building floor in doing laundry. It's not that we do it together. It just seems to be a night when many of the people along our twenty-yard stretch of hallway choose to journey to the basement to get ready for their week.
 
I am struck each week by how much I can guess about people's lives from their laundry carts. For while we may all live on the same floor, greet the same doormen in the lobby each day, press the same button on the elevator, we are a floor of vastly different people, and laundry night points that out as clearly as anything.
 
As I head downstairs with my overloaded, not very organized cart, a cart that shows the wear of the many years I have used it, unable or unwilling to spend the money to replace it, I pass a neighbor whose small cart, which always looks brand new, seems to roll easily from her closet, where all her dirty clothes are neatly tossed all week (no picking up socks from all over for her!) to a single washer (or perhaps two, if delicate items need to be separated). As I stuff as many whites as possible into the largest washer, I notice the guy from across the hall, who uses the jumbo washer for just a bed's worth of sheets and pillowcases. Were I to do the bed linens weekly, it would take multiple washers, perhaps even multiple trips, to do so. As I set up my dryers with fingers crossed that the large piles will dry if I give them fifty minutes, I note that some of the dryers spin with just three items. Who, I ask you, has just three items on a Sunday? And when I am done, and I ride up in the elevator with my still overflowing cart next to a person who has neatly folded a week's worth of outfits while still in the laundry room, I think about how I will negotiate this week to make folding a family project.
 
Each week, we emerge from our hallway doors to do laundry. We are the same in so many ways--a myriad of shared experiences, simply because we live on the same floor of the same building. But on Sunday nights, the laundry carts tell the story. Behind each door is a life that spins in its own unique way. We may all start the week in the same way, turning dirty laundry into clean clothes, but I guarantee you, those weeks that we're starting will be very, very different.