Requiem for a laundromat: Why I loved watching my clothes drying

Illustration by Dell Linney

My family didn’t have a washing machine when I was a kid. Well, at least not one you could wash anything in.

See, there was this big white appliance in the kitchen that could wash all sorts of things, but in our house it was only good for putting stuff on, like the soap you didn’t want to forget when you left for the laundromat.

 

I never did find out exactly why we couldn’t run the washer — one parent blamed the plumbing and the other blamed my father — but I also didn’t really care. Because when we needed clean clothes, I got to go to the laundromat.

That was cool.

 

Not because I liked filling a pillowcase with all my dirty clothes and schlepping it to the car, but because I liked going just about anywhere with my mother, and I loved going to the laundromat.

With no television to watch or video games to play, I was usually starved for entertainment, and to me, the laundromat like an arcade, only much better —  full of fun machines to play with, but without all the oppressive noise and lights.

 

Full of predictable and soothing sounds like the steady whir of washers and spinning of dryers, the laundromat was my version of a “clean, well-lighted place” full of adventure.

Beginning with the change machine that gave out tiny waterfalls of coins. I preferred when it wouldn’t take my dollars at first, making me smooth them again and again, so that finally getting the shower of silver felt that much sweeter.

Once I had the quarters, it was even more fun to put them in the washing mashing, carefully lining up the coins in the narrow holes on the sliding receptacle before pushing them into the washing machine with a satisfying clunk that brought the water rushing onto our clothes. And if my mother wasn’t watching me, I liked to “accidentally” leave the lid on the washer up so I could watch its tub filling and the soap foam as it began to agitate, but she always got wise before my fun got too dangerous.

With the lids down on our churning washers, my thoughts turned to the store next-door, hoping my mother wanted to check the sale bin for cheap sweatshirts so I could beg for some extra quarters to buy candy with. That I rarely happened of course, but rarely was better than never. 

By far the best part of going to the laundromat, though, was watching the dryers. I coveted the last one by the huge window where the chairs were, because then I could sit right next to the glass and watch our clothes spin. I could have watched any dryer, of course, but it felt wrong to stare ant other people’s underwear and socks flopping about.

Watching clothes drying was soothing, one of the best forms of relaxation I’ve known, especially since it was the only form of “doing nothing,” my mom would allow. If I tried just lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling like I wanted to when my mother was reading at her desk, she would tell me to go do my homework, or a chore like dusting.

 

But at the laundromat I was already doing a chore, so watching the dryers was finally mother-approved laziness that I relished. Sometimes I just let all the colors swirl together, sometimes I tried following one piece of clothing around and around and around. 

 

And sometimes, if I watched the colors long enough, they became the cartoons I couldn’t watch at home, the tumbling clothes conjuring Bugs Bunny and The Wonder Twins for me. Those clothes’ cartoons were never quite as entertaining as the ones on TV, of course, but they were never interrupted by annoying commercials, and they always ended with me having piles of warm, clean clothes to carry home.

 

That was very cool.

I still have such warm feelings for our laundromat that I like to visit it every time I go back to my hometown, peeking inside to watch my mother showing me again how to properly fold a shirt at one of the tables, then see if go running to the store next-door, quarter clenched in my fist because I finally convinced my mother to “pretty please let me buy some candy!”

 

My beloved laundromat emptied of its machines.

So I was quite sad on my last visit earlier this year to find that my laundromat was closed, and that all of the washers and dryers I loved were gone.

 

As I took pictures through the window, a man walked up with his dog and told me the place had been gutted very recently.

 

“Fond memories of the laundromat?” he said when I told him I used to go there as a kid.

“Yes” I said. “It was concentrated family time.”

 

“Well, there you have it,” he said, and while it was not cool to find the place closed and all the machines I loved gone, it was cool to talk to someone who also missed it, though for much more practical reasons, as he would need to find a new place to wash his clothes!

One more cool thing about that laundromat: Just about my proudest moment happened there, years after I last visited with my mother. While doing laundry I locked my keys in my car, which was not uncommon, but I retrieved them in a very uncommon way that only my old Volvo would have allowed — crawling into the trunk and unlocking a door with a coat hanger!