Joe does laundry

One day my thoughtful husband offered to do the laundry for me -- take a load off me, so to speak. Since he hasn't done any laundry in the almost two years we've been married, I felt that some training was necessary, and so we headed to the basement.

"This is the washer," I said, pointing to the appliance on the left.

He peered at it. "It doesn't say 'washer' anywhere."

"It says 'water' in several places. That's close enough. And the dryer" -- I motioned toward the appliance on the right -- "says 'dry' in several places."

He glanced from one to the other, then pointed to the washer. "So that's where the clothes go first?"

"Yes," I said. "First, though, we put the water and the detergent in."

"Wait!" he said. He trotted off and came back with a notepad and pen. "TOWELS -- WASHING" he wrote across the top of the pad. "Okay, can you start over?"

This was going to be a long process. Did I have time for this?

"This is a large load of towels, and the dial is already set for large," I began.

"How do I know how much is a large load?" he asked.

"Usually about one Moses basket of clothes is a large load," I said. The Moses basket is what we use for a laundry basket. Our stairwells are too narrow to allow passage of both a person and an average-size laundry basket at the same time, whereas the Moses basket, with its slim profile, easily fits. Plus, it looks better in the bedroom.

"What if I pack the towels down in the basket? Is that okay?" he wanted to know.

"No, you don't pack them in. That will be too many and they won't be able to move around and get clean."

"ONE LOOSELY LEVEL MOSES BASKET," he wrote.

"Can I put the towels in now?" he asked.

"No, first we have to put the water in. Here is where you set the water temperature," I said, and pointed to the dial.

"Why are there two temperatures together?" he demanded. " 'Hot/cold, warm/cold, cold/cold.' "

The first temperature is for washing; the second is for rinsing," I explained. "For towels we use the warm setting."

"W.T. -- W/C" he wrote.

"Are you going to remember what that means?" I said.

"Sure. 'Water temperature -- warm/cold,' " he rattled off.

"I mean will you remember the next time you look at these directions?"

He scribbled out "W/C" and wrote "WARM/COLD."

"Now," I said, "there are two main settings. Normal, and permanent press. For towels we use the normal setting."

"TOWELS NORMAL," he wrote.

"To start the water," I said, "you pull out the dial after you set it to normal."

He jotted this down. "Do we put the towels in yet?" he asked.

"First the detergent." I took it down from the shelf and let him get a good look at it.

"Where do I fill it to?" he asked as he peered in the small scoop.

I pointed to the first line. "Right here for an average load."

"CHEER UP TO LEVEL 1," he wrote.

I made a mental note to only buy Cheer.

"Now do we put the towels in?" he said.

"Yes, now."

He reached for the basket and then went back to his notepad. "PUT TOWELS IN WASHER," he wrote, then added, "(1 LEVEL MOSES BASKET)" in case he would forget to look at his earlier note.

I showed him how to arrange the towels evenly throughout the washer so they didn't get packed down. "This is so much work," he sighed.

"Tell me about it," I said.

Since our washer doesn't have a timer, I told him to set the timer upstairs for 35 minutes. "35, right on the nose? Not 34, or 38?" he asked.

We'll save the drying instructions for another day.