And do less laundry.

Not really.  But it’s a good headline, isn’t it?  One thing about blogging:  I think I’m getting better at headlines.

The reference here is to one of Aesop’s Fables:  “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.”  I always knew it, as many of you probably did, as “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse.”  Without rushing off to re-read it, I think, basically, it is a story about culture shock.

I thought of it today as I was doing yet another load of laundry.

See, back when I was a city mouse, it took us a total of an hour and a half to do all our laundry.  Now that I live in–what?–I don’t think this is the country, and I’m not sure it’s suburbia.  We’ll call it the country, though, for purposes of this discussion.  That’s fair, since one could argue that anyplace outside of New York City is, by contrast, country.  (Unless you live in London, maybe, or Rome.)

So, I used to be a city mouse, and we’d take our clothes down to the laundry room in the basement of our apartment building once a week. We’d fill up all four machines, come back in about 30 minutes and transfer the wet clothes to, maybe, two dryers.  About 40 minutes later, we’d come back, lug them upstairs, and put them all away.

Now that I live in the country, it takes about an hour and a half four to five times a week!

One washer and one dryer–and they’re on the small size.  (We’re going to get bigger ones, eventually, but these work.)  Plus, the dryer is electric where the NYC dryers were gas.  It makes a difference.

Granted, I can write this blog post or mow the lawn or do other things while the clothes are spinning, but I did that kind of thing in the city, too, between elevator runs.  Who’d have thought, as I moved away from museums and theatres and corner delis and world-class restaurants and public transportation, that one of the things I’d miss most would be laundry rooms?