Once the laundry is finished drying, my mother will add the fresh, lilac-scented sweaters, socks, training bras, and embroidered jeans to our bags. We will gather our belongings, pack a few snacks for the drive, load up the car, lock the front door, and leave the key under the mat. She will heave a deep breath and look up at the house, squinting. I will look anywhere but the house, anywhere but her squinting face. I will pretend that I am not crying, that my eyes are merely itchy from the spring pollen in the air, and she will give me a modicum of privacy by pretending not to notice. She will be leaving my father, and I will be taken along.

For now, though, the laundry hums and shakes and rattles as it has always done, although never under such intense scrutiny from me. I watch the clothes rumble and rotate and inhale the warm scent of the dryer sheet. Above me, the sound of my mother’s heels click-clack against the tiles of our kitchen and pans clatter against each other as she wraps up the selected pots and pans that she has decided are more hers than my father’s. When the upstairs sounds become too much, I scoot closer to the dryer and press my forehead against it, letting it vibrate my head and jumble up my brain. 

I think about laundry memories because they are comforting and smell good in my thoughts. I think about coming in from the neighborhood on snow days, stamping off the frozen clumps from my shoes while my cheeks are freezer-burnt red. Just as I’m sure I’ll keel over from the cold racking my limbs, my father comes up from the basement with fluffy, hot towels fresh from the dryer. He drapes them over my shoulders and I smile. I think about coming home from school crying, fruit punch spilled all down the front of my second-favorite shirt. It had a kitten on it and said, in sparkly letters, “Cute as a kitten!” I think about the overwhelming relief I felt watching my mother pull it from the dryer hours later, stain-free and brand-new. I think about my brief fascination with dryer lint, how my father showed me how to scoop the fuzz out, and how I collected it in a small box — all these fragments of my family’s clothing. I wonder when I started throwing it away instead, when it stopped mattering to me. 

Eventually, the vibrating stops, and my thoughts settle back into my brain and my brain settles back into my head. The dryer beeps—a bell tolling, a finality. I get to my feet and head upstairs to join my mother.

– Evelyn Maguire