A few months into my new found outlook on just how oblivious I really was to my daily wasteful routine, I ran full force into my first real "test". If you were to enter my house through the garage, and make a right hand turn, you walk smack dab into my laundry room. It's pretty much the standard...measured and built just right to place two beautiful, matching, shiny pieces of metal equipment spaced just inches, but perfectly apart. This Dynamic Duo was taken for granted every day in my house. Countless trips a day were made to and from the little room, loading and unloading, loading and unloading...usually more loading than unloading. I had even fantasized a few times that if my little room were just a hair bigger, I could fit two dryers...one for drying and one for storing!!
To my devastation one day, I opened my dryer to find a pile of sopping wet clothes. In full blown panic, I started retracing my steps a few hours prior. Did I turn the darn thing on? Well, I did what any freaked out, overworked, pregnant mom of two (going on three) would do...I reran that puppy! Maybe, I was just a full blown space cadet and never pushed the start button?
An hour and a half later, nothing. The clothes weren't even warm! As my heart was racing a mile a minute, I ran to the phone to call the hubby. He'd know what to do...who cares if he's forehead deep in a pile of work, I was having a catastrophe, and he was going to help! I have a horrible habit of calling him in the mist of a nervous breakdown and expecting him to drop everything he's doing to fix my world. Of course, my Knight in Shining Armor came through. "It's the heating element", he tells me. That made sense, so off to my trusty search engine to find the cheapest heating element for my dryer that could possibly be found. The economy had just started doing it's crazy little dance, and we were caught up in the middle of the construction industry's collapse. Money was certainly not one of those things we had an excess of, so spending it on anything scared me to death. Never mind on something I already had that had decided to go on strike!
There I was with a pile of dirty clothes that seemed to multiply like rabbits and NO DRYER!! It was rather comical though. Had you walked into my house, you may have second guessed if you had taken a wrong turn and ended up in a second hand shopping mall or something. There were clothes everywhere...hanging from the doorways, the counter-tops, the back of the couch and all over the shelves in my laundry room. A funny thing was happening though, as each day passed, God really took charge and starting changing the way I thought. Each load of clothes that was strung from one end of the house to the other began to represent dollar signs and a decrease in our carbon footprint. I found that the more I hung, the more I wanted to hang.
Well, it's funny, when God wants you to do something, he has a way of getting it done. Our dryer element arrived, my handy dandy hubby installed it, and woohoo...we had our dryer back! Would you believe, not even two days later, the belt snapped on that hunk of junk. It was one of those, "ok, I get it" moments.
I know this sounds like I should be committed, but there was this part of me that was happy the dryer broke again (not the part of me that was fuming about the $30 I had just spent on a heating element though). Then, the most insane thing I've every heard myself say came out of my mouth. I decided I wanted a clothesline. Yep, you heard right, a CLOTHESLINE!! Did they even make those things anymore? Where in the world was I going to put it? My back yard was all of five square inches (not really, but it's seriously SMALL). Besides, there was only one spot that even got enough sunlight to do the job. It was my favorite spot in the yard...a small space cut off from the rest of the yard lined with pretty, brick pavers strategically alternated with squares of perfectly manicured grass. At the back of this quaint, little space was a pergola covered bench backing up to the coquina wall that divides our pitiful pieces of land we call backyards. Growing up the coquina and making it's way into the the lattice around the bench with just the right amount of green was a Creeping Fig vine. It really was a nice little retreat...I didn't want to taint it with a clothesline!
Lucky for me, that hubby of mine came to the rescue again. My Dynamic Duo became the Lone Ranger, and my pretty, little backyard space got accessorized with a clothesline. A removable clothesline...genius! It's galvanized steel cable with a loop on each end, and the loops hook onto eye bolts that are mounted to the walls. The ironic part...I've never removed it!!
I can't believe I am going to post this picture...here's to being real!
This is me using my clothesline for the very first time. My husband thought it was hilarious to catch me on camera 9 MONTHS PREGNANT and hanging out cloth diapers. Like I said, keeping it real.
No comments:
Post a Comment