220411 Sentinel, Laundry

Everyone who enjoys doing laundry, raise your hand.
I see from the crowd that only a select few enjoy laundry day.

I was Joyce’s helper doing laundry for 32 years out of 58. Now that she has passed I am on my own with it. It is not the most fun thing in my life and just washing and drying is the easy part. That leads to folding t-shirts, underware, socks (that have to be sorted and paired) along with bed sheets. That leads to putting everything away. It’s a big task as those who do laundry know well. Making the bed up afterward is just one more task. One thing that did and still happens is trying to find the dryer sheets when pulling the clothes out of the dryer. There’s always one that I cannot find. It ends up in a shirt sleeve or a trouser leg that can only be found the next time a person puts that item on again.
I always felt sorry for the laundry crew onboard the aircraft carriers. Can you imagine doing stinking laundry on a 12 hour shift, seven days a week? It took that to keep 5,500 guys in clean clothes. They had to press the officers' uniforms so they looked crisp and shiny, while we enlisted had our clothes packed into huge sacks and sent them to our berthing compartments where the compartment cleaners piled them on each man's bunk for us to deal with. Wrinkly clothes were okay to wear as long as they were clean, but most of us used an iron to press them.
Our last year in the navy Joyce used to walk Annie to school and then worked as a motel maid on Coronado in California. Annie could walk there after school and then she and Joyce walked home together. Some of Joyce’s stories about the condition of those rooms were horrific after several young sailors had a big party the night before. There was a navy chief recruiter that stayed there some nights and he would almost make up his room before he left the next morning. That made Joyce very happy. That being the only motel on the island there were often ladies and gentlemen who spent the night together, although they were not single people at the time. There were some very interesting things left behind. I won’t go into the details, but you can use your own imagination about that.