BROKEN JUST RIGHT (2025-2)

The lid to my washing machine has a broken lock.

In a flash of inspiration, when our house ws being built, I asked our builder how hard it would be to add a stack washer and dryer to our main bedroom closet. The timing was great because the plumbing and electrical had not been completed. That little tweak to our floor plan has been life changing for me. Since I’ve been an adult, laundry rooms are not places of tranquility for me. I have a couple friends who find fulfillment and peace in that space. It might have to do with the rhythm of folding and the concept of order and cleanliness. I sometimes imagine myself to be that kind of tidy, pristine and orderly person, but reality inevitably smacks me in the face.

For 30 years the machine in our closet has done the bulk of our family laundry, even though we have a laundry room on each of the other levels of our house. Let me pause to acknowledge how ridiculously privileged this is. My teenage years were spent lugging baskets up flights of stairs to the laundry room in our apartment building in Pittsburgh. We put laundry on each level of our current home because the kids all did their own laundry. But I digress….

We’ve replaced the stack washer and dryer in our bedroom closet twice. That’s pretty good for something being used pretty much every day for 30 years. I love being able to multitask and not have to focus so intently on something relatively unfulfilling to me. I’ll put a batch in the washer, take a shower, do my hair, get dressed, then put that batch in the dryer. My blouses and pants I can dry just enough while I brush and blush to get the wrinkles out and then hang them over the heating vent to complete drying. This morning the towels after showers went directly into hot water with a couple Tide pods, all before I even got dressed. 

The machine currently chirping away in our closet is on its last leg. It squeaks as it churns. Its noisy, but it gets the job done. I’d start looking for a new one except for one thing: the lid is broken and I don’t want one that is fixed. It’s not that the lid won’t close, but that it won’t lock. So, I can keep the lid up and watch the machine as it does its work. It’s broken just right.

Sometimes I stand there over the massive magic cube and watch the rhythmic motion of the agitator turning back and forth, back and forth. It kind of feels like the angels playing with a spirograph. Its mesmerizing, and quite calming. And I always feel the presence of my mother, and strangely, the grandmother I never knew as I stand there. I throw my mind into pretend mode and think I’m my grandmother, weary from working at a washboard urging Idaho  sweat and dirt from the menfolk’s work clothes, stunned and amazed that this metal device is willing and able to do the work for me. 

The machine of my childhood, down in the basement on Old Clairton Road, never had a lock on the lid. Mom would send me down with an additional towel she found in the kitchen. “Hurry, before the cycle is through!” The cold cement floor, the drumbeat of the agitator banging the machine against the wall, the warmth of the dryer door opening at the end of its cycle… all the scents and sounds and vibrations are sweetly familiar to my heart. I remember holding one of mom’s nylon stockings in my fist; the thigh at my fingertips and the foot of the sock in the water as the machine agitated. If I closed my eyes I could imagine the tugging felt like a trout on my fishing line. The cold cement floor of the laundry room became the chilly water of the rippling Snake River in Island Park. 

I can do that still, with this broken machine of mine. Perfection, I’ve come to believe, isn’t always the goal. My machine is broken just right. I let it squeak and squeal, because I know a new one would have a locking lid, and where would the magic be in that?

Laundry tips I remember from my mother: 

Wash in like colors, Never mix whites with darks. 

Wash darks in cool or cold. White cottons in hot. 

Clorox will turn white polyester yellow. Sunlight will bleach your whites to a perfect white. 

Clotheslines are therapeutic, and the Idaho wind is the best fabric scent out there. 

Wash like colors - Dry like fabrics (ie- don't dry jeans with blouses, even if they're the same color. 

Every laundry room needs a bar of Fels Naptha soap for stains and neck rings. It also needs clorox and amonia. 

Never mix bleach and amonia. Use one or the other. If you have sour rags that are colored, use amonia. If they're white, use bleach. 

Vinegar is also useful in laundry. 

Liquid Era is the best at getting out blood and protein stains. Always use cold water.

Aerosol hairspray applied before washing helps get out ink stains. Spray, then dob with a rag, and repeat.

A clean dry towel added to wet ones will help the batch dry faster.

Remove clothes still warm from the dryer and hang directly to avoid wrinkles. Spray water into a dryer multiple times and turn it on to let a wrinkled batch renew.