I always do laundry on Friday. When I was young and read Lucy Maud Montgomery's books, I nodded my head in approval when chores were assigned a day of the week. The order pleased me. Mostly, I thought the past - a vague idea without years assigned to it - was romantic with its dresses and etiquette. Now I know that laundry was a very large task and that it was assigned to a day because it took a whole day to do. Now, as Susan Strasser writes in Never Done, "modern women draw water and dry their clothes in the isolated privacy of their own homes, on any day they like" (p. 121). For us, it's Friday.
Domestic chores, historically assigned to women, followed this trend in my childhood home, and so, by default I think of my mother and her mother and the things we inherited of a tasks we’ve held in common. My grandma did a lot of ironing for example, whereas my mom refused to buy herself an ironing board. My mom was loathe to separate colours and folded shirts in half, tucked in the sleeves, and halved them again, lengthwise. I separate colours and fold shirts into thirds before halving them lengthwise. She used powder detergent, I use liquid.
As for the ennui of folding clothes – I have podcasts for diversion. Mom had no such thing. She folded laundry straight from the dryer in the silence of the windowless basement room. The most exciting thing to come from that time was a discovery that her youngest child had perfect pitch. He couldn’t yet talk but he had perfect pitch, humming sequences of notes back and forth.
It seems antiquated to think of doing laundry according to a set of rules, and yet the phenomenon of Marie Kondo’s book and Netflix series makes me think otherwise. If there are inherent laundry habits you accept or reject from what you grew up seeing, there are still people willing to impart new lessons. Because of Marie Kondo’s cheerful persuasion, I fold shirts and socks differently than I used to. However, the conclusion here is not that there is a right way or a wrong way of doing laundry, but rather that there is no thing too small too mundane not to modify or adapt or learn more about.