Ode to a Washer

I have always had this problem of attaching memories and unreasonable emotions to inanimate objects. It took a few tears, a talking to and quite a few people to move the couch I had growing up, that I took to college, and had our first year of marriage, to the dump. Somehow I had personified it, and felt that it was really sad that I was getting rid of it, and I felt guilty thinking of it sitting lonely at the dump. (I know, I never said that I was reasonable…)

I came home from being away for a week to my washing machine (which was our first major purchase as a married couple) being broken. We got this machine when moved out to the eastern shore of VA shortly after we got married. We lived in a little rented house (which remains my favorite) just down the road from "Crack Corner"

Nope, I am not kidding, and if you ever meet someone from the Eastern Shore and you say “Crack Corner”, they will most likely say “Oh in Exmore?” Ahhh the memories, Willis Warf, biking everywhere, fresh vegetables, drug busts in my driveway…you know, all the good stuff!

Anyway, we couldn’t afford the dryer, so we figured we could just get a washer. Yeah, the first 6 months we lived there it rained…like EVERYDAY…I can remember hang drying clothes all over our house with fans on them. Or going out to hang our clothes on the line during the 1 hour of the day that it didn’t rain, and getting eaten alive by man sized mosquitoes, only to find that the clothes never could dry because it was so humid outside that the air itself made the clothes more wet than when they came out of the washer.

One night, in tears because I couldn’t sleep from scratching too much, I counted 205 mosquito bites on my legs…yes I did promptly wake my sleeping husband to tell him, and then complain that I couldn’t sleep and I hated that we didn’t have a dryer and so on and so on…I am thankful that it was our first months of marriage, because if I did that now, he would probably impale me with a drying rack….actually, who am I kidding, after this many years he totally can tune me out!

So alas, after 13 years our washing machine must go…I am not going to feeling so sad though because there is a really nice front loader waiting to take its place…I will just apologize for not being able to fix it, and wave out the window as they take it to the washing machine graveyard…See? I am growing!