Have you ever felt like you're on the edge, holding your breath, ready to jump in?
Have you ever felt like you're on the edge, holding your breath, ready to jump in, but there's no water in the pool?
That's how we're feeling right about now.
We're on the edge of suitcases, on the edge of cooler food, on the edge of a small hotel room with five bodies in it, and three of those bodies seem to be getting more energetic by the hour. (If only the tolerance level of the other two bodies would escalate in direct proportion to the energy level of the three, but I dare say it hasn't.)
We're on the edge of all that, ready to jump into a home, but alas, there's no water in that pool. Not yet, anyway.
But, there is laundry to do. Imagine that!
There's laundry to do at a quiet little laundromat down the street.
Having left four bodies back at the hotel, you walk in by yourself, carrying a week's worth for five. There's one man filling a huge bag with his clean, folded laundry before he throws it onto his back and walks out the door. Besides him, there's only one other woman who's just now drying her sheets. Pretty soon, she's gone, too, and it's just you, your magazine and the whirring of the washers, with a little country music playing faintly in the background.
When you've sufficiently climbed into the pages of House Beautiful and festered there a while, an old rancher walks in. You hardly notice him, because your brain is soaking in the whys and ways of "making any size room work better". The rancher seems quite busy around the place, and soon your curiosity flicks your eyes up from between the glossy pages long enough to follow him around the room and realize that he must own the place.
He's wearing dirty, old cowboy boots and muck is dried into the creases of his Rustler jeans. He's got a leather belt cinched up below his waist (it appears he lost the proper place to wear it some time ago), and red suspenders run over his faded t-shirt and parallel down his chest, then curve wide around the sides of his pot belly. His glasses are big enough for him to see well in all directions, and wrinkles run in folds forward of his ears, down toward his jaw-line, and when he turns away, you see the wrinkles back there running a perfect cross-hatch pattern across the back of his neck. Your pretty sure that his wiry white hair barely covers his pink head, but you'll never really know because of the sweat-stained cap he's wearing that says, Wash-n-Go Laundry across the crown.
As he goes past you, straightening the mess of newspapers on the table and picking up wayward dryer sheets from off the floor with his "as seen on TV" grabbers, he apologizes to you that the place looks so messy. He says he procrastinated coming in today because he was out fixing fence. You say that you don't mind at all, and would he mind breaking a $20, because you've run out of quarters, and you're only half-way done.
When he goes off with your twenty and his wad of keys, another woman comes in the door and plops her load of laundry down at the nearest washer. On his way back with your money, he sees her and says,
"Hi, there, Martha, how's it goin'?"
She replies, "Oh, pretty good. How's your wife doing?"
"She's gettin' around better, now." he answers as he hands over your change.
You begin busily feeding the hungry dryer, adding two more quarters than you thought you needed, because he looks at your load, leans on the handle of the dustmop that's now in his hands, cocks his head to the side and says,
"That one's gonna need at least $2.25 or $2.50 to get 'em dry."
You add the extra, then go climb back into your magazine, while he gets busy dustmopping and emptying trash cans. After $2.75, your clothes are dry. You stand at the table, folding, folding, folding, and he stops for a chat when he comes by with his wet mop. You say that you've just moved to the area and he says that lots of people have these days, and that he just hopes the job market holds out.
Then, he starts talking about his land and his horses, and how he had to leave quick just a bit ago (between the dustmopping and emptying of the trash cans) because he'd forgotten to close the gate, and his horses had gotten out.
You chat a little longer while you load your clean, dry laundry into bags. As you tip-toe over the wet mopped floor, you say thanks for everything. His mop swish-swishes across the floor in front of his worn-out boots, and without missing a beat, he replies,
"Thank you, Sis! Welcome to the neighborhood."
And you know he really means it.
There now. Now you have a look inside the laundromat of a small western town.
It may have taken a thousand words, but you've got the picture.
