Lip Balm and Laundry

Just about every Sunday night, we set out to turn three large laundry hampers into clean clothes for the coming week. It can be an arduous job. Between the sorting and the schlepping and the folding  and the fitting back in the drawers--let's just say that it's not anyone's favorite activity of the week. Yet, we barrel though, and sometimes, now that everyone can help with sorting or folding or distribution, it becomes a way to spend some quality time together. Okay, maybe the "quality" part is debatable, but it's definitely "together" time.
 
Sometimes, we laugh over how tricky it is to tell these days what belongs to whom. Sometimes, we grumble about the food wrappers or tissues that have been left in pockets and have gone through the wash. And once in a while, when what has gone through is a lip balm, we find ourselves doing much of the laundry again. Lip balm can do a number on laundry.
 
Luckily, this doesn't happen often. After all, in a busy life, it's hard enough to do everything, and nearly impossible to fit in re-doing anything. And finding you've missed things (whether it's in sorting laundry or in doing any task) can be demoralizing. But these things happen. They just do. And what I've learned is that we move on. If it takes re-doing, we do it. If it takes some apologizing, we do it. If it takes spending some of our time not exactly the way we want to, we do that too.
 
Kind of like life, isn't it? We don't just stop doing the things we want to do, just because they might cause a difficulty down the road. We can be more careful, sure. Careful to put the lip balm somewhere else, careful to remove the candy wrappers and the tissues and the quarters and the dollars and the earbuds from our pockets before loading the washers. But things happen--dollars get washed, and wrappers get dried, and lip balm does what it does, and life bumps along, and we deal with it. We don't stop our lives because we've hit a snag. We learn from it, of course. We become a little more vigilant perhaps. But when we stop carrying snacks or spare change or lip balm because of what we fear MIGHT happen, we might as well throw in the towel.

And let's face it--who really wants to wash another towel?