Two Roads Diverged

Oh fair and gentle reader! Thou hast choices to make!

In a world of competitive cable news and innumerable Internet sites, one simply lacks the time to pursue all his fancies.  But trust my honest and unbiased opinion: my site is your all-in-one destination for the latest news and opinion. DrudgeReport and Washington Times be gone!  Choose to spend more time on In the Arena.

I had to make a difficult decision with my time today, but unlike yours, I’m still not so sure that it’s the right one.  Down to my last pair of pants and second-to-last shirt, the inside-out trick just couldn’t cut it anymore. The solar panel on my house is not quite big enough for a washer and drier, not even one of those two-in-one energy saver models (I know, right?), so I instead began to wash the clothes by hand.

I started at 7:00, the perfect time to wash clothes.  It’s not so hot early, and it gives you the whole day to let the clothes dry in the sun.  Today was a clear and, never knowing when the rain could envelop the mountains and refuse to depart, I took advantage.

I can imagine the scene well through Dolores’ eyes.  She, a 55-65 year-old-woman who lives across the street, was sweeping her immaculately clean dirt front yard when a tall and awkward gringo, clothes spilling from his laundry bag (what she could not have known was that the bag was from the Middlebury laundry service, to which I subscribed for two years) onto his trash-ridden dirt yard, tried to be a campesino.  He filled his ponchera, or bucket, with too little water, stared at the back of the detergent, scratched his heads, sorted his clothes, began talking to himself, dropped his now wet clothes on the ground, and spoke louder to himself, this time in short, anger-laden words, and looked puzzled as clothes once brilliantly white now had streaks of red, green, and orange.

Dolores offered to help,  but I tried to be a tigre, the word that Dominicans use to describe a player, someone who doesn’t need help, a little distant, always cool.  She, as well as most people who have ever met me, saw through that thin, thin façade.

She took a break from sweeping and grabbed the clothes out of my hand.  “Tiene que hacerlo así,” she told me, as she rubbed the clothes more vigorously than I ever could.  Laughing, completely incredulous that I hadn’t ever done something like this before, Dolores was clearly looking for an explanation.  My possible defense consisted of two options: 1) I had washed my clothes by hand before.  I spent 8 weeks living with an indigenous community in México, and there I had to wash clothes by hand, too.  There, however, by the end of the trip, the clothes had taken on a what would turn out to be permanent mildew smell which made me, I’m convinced, sicker then I think I’ve ever been; or 2) I had always used a washing machine.  Both answers seemed less than convincing, and I remained silent.

The short of the story is this: Dolores taught me how to wash the clothes, I did so, it took the better part of the morning, and I doubt the clothes are really even that clean.  Now, at 12:30 pm, knuckles raw and biceps soar, I’m finally on to other things.

What’s a man to do?  And would partial dependence, paying someone else to take care of my dirt laundryy, be OK? 

Your thoughts, oh humble reader, would be greatly appreciated.