Don of Detergent Dumbfounded

I am by no means obsessive-compulsive. On the other hand, I am far from being an outright slob. However, there are simply times when life’s busy pace causes me to leave wholly inoffensive articles of clothing on the bedroom floor. 

The end of the world, it is not.

My wife will sometimes spontaneously pick up my strewn clothes and fold them, leaving them in a neat pile on the dresser.

Helpful, indeed.

And point taken.

Last week, she added a new twist.

The spontaneously folded clothes on the dresser somehow looked familiar and unfamiliar. That is to say, some looked like clothes I had left on the floor with definite plans to wear them again in the near future, while others looked like they had been freshly washed.

Impossible. No one would deliberately stack clean articles of clothing together with unwashed ones!

Intrigued and unsettled by the prospect, I began to sniff the various articles of clothing in the stack, only to conclude someone had, indeed, folded washed and unwashed articles of clothing and stacked them together.

What could the possible motivation be? Inquiring minds demanded to know.

After animated discussion, I decided Susan plainly had no intention to mislead; she sweetly insisted it just happened that way.

More to pile of laundry than meets the eye

Satisfied she had no surreptitious intent, I asked whether she could at least understand how her mixed pile of folded clothing might be confusing. She denied she understood. I persisted, stifling exasperation and patiently explaining, I had to separate the pile of clothes by using my nose!

My nose, not being nearly as reliable as the ones at the end of our dogs’ snouts, could lead to detection errors, causing me to wear something unwashed under the assumption it had been washed.

She did not see a problem.

I, being the Master of the Maytag, the Don of Detergent, the Laveur of Laundry, the Specialist of Spotless and Wise Man of Wash, decided I should fight fire with fire!

I do most of the laundry in the house (see September 2, 2011 blog "Inside-Out Privileges").

When I leave a stack of clothes for someone, rest assured the articles are all freshly and authentically cleaned and appropriately folded. There’s no “partially clean”! There’s no “unwashed”! There's no question what you see is what you get! I suggested to my wife that, in an effort to help her understand how disconcerting a mixed stack of clothing could be, I might just mix some of her washed and unwashed articles into the same pile of folded clothing.

She seemed completely unfazed.

Her being unfazed, has me completely fazed! Has she trained the dogs to separate washed and unwashed articles of clothing for her? Is her nose that much more sensitive than mine?

It’s preposterous to think she'd stack washed articles of clothing together with unwashed ones in the hopes I would tuck them all away into their drawers and closets, thereby limiting messiness and killing two birds with one stone - although the frightening deviousness of such a plan verges on sheer genius.

Hmmmm. Maybe I should train the dogs.