Home Run!

My laundry room is just off the kitchen. When I have a dirty dish towel, I  throw it across the room and let it land on the laundry room floor where it will get my attention some time in the future. Most of the time, it will land somewhere in the middle of the floor where I will kick it to a pile with other similarly discarded kitchen towels on my next pass through to the garage. Every once in a while, it'll land in a basket of clean laundry whereupon I find it necessary to walk the extra twenty steps to segregate the two, lest I end up folding and reusing the dirty towel. Once, I managed to throw a strike - straight through the open door of my front loading washer. Yesterday, I threw my first "home run!"

I broke the zipper on my sweater bag. For those who might not know, a sweater bag is something you might put small or delicate items in before putting the whole zippered bag into the laundry. It's usually constructed of a mesh material so that the items inside are washed clean while protected from rougher items swirling around with them such as jeans, zippers, buttons, grommets or hooks.

I had just come home with a new sweater bag and as I was unloading my groceries, I threw my new purchase from the kitchen to the laundry room. I didn't bother to unwrap it - I figured I could do that later. There were two sweater bags in a flat plastic package made stiff with a cardboard insert so that it sailed like a square Frisbee across the room. The package hit flat on the laundry room floor, spinning and sliding, the plastic packaging and the linoleum floor meeting to promote the package's slippery momentum straight to my washing machine.

And then, it kept going, spinning, spinning out of sight, under the washing machine to the black hole that exists behind it. Just like that, it was gone. Who knows what's back there? Am I willing to look and discover what else lives there?

I expect what lives there are the monsters of Maurice Sendak. I hope not for there would be no hope for my sweater bag. At best, there might be stray socks. But, still, is it worth it?