Dirty Laundry

We smelled like wet dog.

On a three-week trip to Australia and New Zealand, my husband Richard and I packed one suitcase each. Ten days in, we were out of clean clothes.

We were at Ayers Rock Resort in the southern portion of Australia’s Northern Territory. The sacred sandstone monolith’s name had been returned to the one given by its Aboriginal Traditional Owners, the Anangu people. Uluru.

That morning, we had gone on a sunrise Segway tour along the nearly six-mile path around Uluru’s base. In the rain.

As the drizzle continued, Uluru, taller than the Eiffel Tower, took on a silvery gray sheen. Crystal-clear waterfalls began streaming down its face—a phenomenon that our guide said occurred fewer than twenty days a year.

Breathing deeply, we caught the distinctive sweet honey scent of the yellow blooming mulga wattle. The blossoms contrasted with the red desert soil. The area was rich in iron oxide—so much so that putting a magnet to the ground attracted the dirt.

Our guide told us that for decades, hikers would leave behind their water bottles, camera batteries, even human waste. The desert heat baked everything in place. Rain would release the chemicals and bacteria into watering holes, concentrating the toxins.

In 2019, the Anangu and park authorities banned climbing the monolith, allowing the damaged area to begin healing.

As we returned to the hotel, calm settled over me.

But I knew we had to do laundry.

We gathered our muddy jeans, hiking shirts, socks, and undies, and trundled them to the small laundry unit located on-site.

Of course, there are rules in a public laundry facility. Mostly unwritten, they guide the moral and ethical considerations of sharing a limited number of washers and dryers with total strangers.

For me, rule one is not to hog all the machines. Rule two is to remove your laundry as soon as the machine is finished. Rule three is to be nice.

These rules cross all cultures and languages. Right?

When we entered the laundry hut, no washing machines were available.

A tall gentleman dressed in a red-and-white plaid shirt, sleeves ripped away at the shoulders, walked in.

I struck up a conversation and learned that he had put his laundry in the wash, soon to be done. (Rule number two!)

He was British and on a seven-week unpaid holiday. University was not for him. He had started employment in a grocery chain at seventeen. Now in his forties, he still worked there.

His grandmother had traveled the Far East and Australia when she was a young woman. He had been inspired by her intrepid spirit, decided to follow her path, and saved for years to afford retracing her journey. Now he was living it.

He told me he had bought three more suitcases during the trip, filling them with six pairs of Converse sneakers, each in a different color to match various outfits.

“So, you like clothes,” I said, referring to his shopping. His machine finished and he loaded a free dryer.

“I do, but my husband is the clothes horse,” he said. “I actually like denim.”

“Denim?” I asked as I started my first load in the now open washer.

“Yes,” he replied. “I take squares of denim and crochet them together to make quilts. A group of four of us mates get together once a week to make them.”

“That’s awesome,” I said. “Do you give the quilts to your friends?”

“No, they have so many things I’ve crocheted now. We give them to our local hospice,” he said.

“That’s so generous and thoughtful,” I replied. I didn’t tell him I was a hospice doc, or that over the years, I had seen how meaningful these acts of kindness were for my patients.

A dark-haired gentleman strolled into the laundry area. He emptied out a washer and put the clothes into an open dryer. He nodded and left.

Inside the empty washer, I found a pair of tiny pink shorts, still wet. I laid them on the counter and stuffed as many of our dirty clothes into the washer as I could.

I was trained in laundromat etiquette by one of the best. My mom. When I was growing up on the farm and our washing machine broke, Mom decided to not purchase a new one. We drove five miles to town to use the public laundry facility. Once a week.

Dad worked two jobs—as a propeller mechanic and a farmer. His clothes were grimy and sweat-stained. With seven in the family, we could easily fill at least that many machines.

Mom was an expert at sorting. Whites from darks, towels from sheets. Dad’s work-hardened, smelly clothes—solo.

Laundry was an outing. My younger sister Valarie and I were allowed to hold the quarters. Once the washers were filled and started, Mom took us around the corner to Mrs. Bakers Sub Shop. There, Mom bought us lunch, then chatted with Mrs. Baker while we ate.

Smoke from their cigarettes curled gently above the ashtray perched on the linoleum counter.

Valarie and I would split a tuna sub with extra mayo. And we got a special drink. I loved chocolatey Yoo-hoo, a welcome break from our dairy farm milk.

Often, the bell over Mrs. Baker’s Sub Shop door chimed. Laundromat customers or townspeople ducked in as Mom enthusiastically greeted them.

She never met a stranger.

After catching up on who was sick, who had recently married, who was having a baby, and if there was a funeral, Mom returned to the laundromat, stepping lighter.

Then we loaded all the wet laundry into baskets, put it in the car, drove home, and hung it on our outdoor clotheslines to dry. Because why use a dryer when God provided air?

Back in Australia, my Englishman waved goodbye as his clothes tumbled in the dryer. “I’ll be back soon,” he said.

In a few minutes, a gray-haired couple walked in wearing soiled hiking boots.

The couple sat down to wait for their clothes to finish drying.

A dryer stopped just as my first load of wash finished.

I looked outside. No one else was coming.

“What should I do, honey?” I asked Richard.

“It’s in the rules somewhere, I’m sure,” Richard said. “If you don’t retrieve your laundry when it’s done, it can be removed.”

He knew the rules! I thought. This must be rule four.

“Should we?” I asked. Richard nodded and started pulling out the dry clothes, placing them on the counter near the wet shorts.

I started folding a stranger’s laundry. There was a toddler’s bathing suit top, baby shirts, and a little skirt. I held up a little T-shirt.

“Oh, my gosh. Too cute, right?” I said.

The woman smiled slightly.

The wet shorts must have been from this load, I thought. Lord, a dad with little kids on vacation, and it’s raining.

“What are you doing?” Richard asked.

“I’m folding the laundry so that it doesn’t wrinkle,” I replied.

“That’s a rule! You don’t touch other people’s laundry,” Richard said.

“Well, you just did!” I said, looking up at the couple. I set down the shirt. Had Richard slipped in another rule? This was getting to be like the Ten Commandments.

“That’s different. The person should have been here when the machine finished.”

I hesitated. My fingers itched to neatly fold and stack the little items.

I reluctantly sat down, leaving the load piled on the counter.

We started to chat with the couple. We learned he was an accounting professor; she was an architect. They met in their twenties and were now celebrating thirty years of marriage.

They didn’t have children.

I had held up the little clothes without knowing what that might have meant to them, if anything.

I mentally added another rule: Don’t assume. And some things never get asked.

After about fifteen minutes, the man with the jet-black hair strolled in while staring at his phone. He saw the pile of clothes on the counter and picked up the wet shorts.

“Who took out my laundry?” he said, looking at me. How did he know? “It’s still wet.”

“Oh,” I said. “No, there was one wet piece still in the washer. I took that out and laid it there. But the dryer had been stopped for at least fifteen minutes.”

That was mostly true, I thought. I wasn’t sure I wanted to fully fess up that we had removed his dry clothes.

“Well, no one should do that,” the man said.

The man took the clothes we had removed from the dryer and put them back into an empty dryer, setting the timer for an hour. He spun around, glared, and left.

I should have folded them, I thought, feeling a dull ache in my chest.

The room felt smaller as the four of us looked at each other.

“So, are you on vacation from work?” I asked to break the silence.

“No, we’re retired,” the professor said.

He told us about the job he had recently left.

“It’s a rush to see the look in a student’s eyes as they learn something they didn’t understand,” he said. But the pandemic had changed that for him. When the students returned, more communication happened through online portals, instead of face-to-face.

“I just found I wasn’t enjoying teaching anymore,” he said, sighing deeply. “So, I retired, and we decided to start our traveling while we were a bit younger.”

We chatted some more while his wife folded their dried clothes. He seemed content to sit in the wicker-like plastic chair and answer our questions about his life.

“You ready?” his wife asked, raising an eyebrow, a large bundle of clothes in her arms.

“I should have helped,” he said, his face reddening.

“No, it was fine,” she said, smiling at him and then nodding to us.

“So nice to meet you both,” he said, eagerly shaking Richard’s hand. They left, chatting excitedly to each other.

The only sound in the laundry room was the soft, rhythmic karumpf of clothes tossing in the dryer.

The Englishman came back. I introduced him to Richard. They chatted for a few minutes as he gathered his dry clothes. “Cheerio,” he said, smiling as he left.

Shortly after that, the dark-haired man came back. He barely looked at us.

He gathered his now very dry clothes, dropping the little pink lace-trimmed shorts to the ground. As he bent to pick them up, I smiled at him.

He did not return my smile.

I didn’t know his story. The ache returned to my chest. I just didn’t want to be the reason his day felt heavier.

With the last of our laundry finished, Richard and I headed back to our room carrying clean, warm clothes.

“You know, you can talk to anyone,” Richard said.

I smiled, catching a glimpse of the horizon behind his head.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’m just trying to sort it all out.”

The clouds had parted for the first time that day.

Golden rays hit Uluru in the distance.

Glowing—washed clean by the morning rain.

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Check out other travel reflections in Hometown Hero and Where the Rio Grande Roams