Prison Laundry

Ideologically, I'm changing. Things matter to me more now than they ever did, like my carbon footprint. I find myself conscious of the things I do everyday that might make it a little deeper, or etched. We don't use plastic anymore and try hard not to purchase things that come in petroleum laden casing. We don't cook with it or use the microwave as much, if at all (Although I do use it to time my recipes, like the chicken pot pie that's in the oven right now).

Take laundry. We tried countless times to use only organic detergents. Tide and the like are poison to both us and the environment. But each time our clothes ended up smelling like a wet dog. Not the best scent for trying to keep clients, but I did fit in better on the T. Once again, at rara's behest, we are trying a product recommended by a fellow crunchie, I'll keep you posted, or maybe you can just approach me and take a whiff.

But as with all things, rara has taken laundry to a new level, preferring to take garments into the shower to clean. I have the utmost aversion to this, not because I don't applaud her efforts but because of the trauma it evokes. Let me explain:

Just after the initial strip search in prison, the guard hands you bedding, heavy denim, and a fishnet bag for laundry. Every Wednesday they collect those laundry bags, which we cons stuff and tie as tightly as we can for fear the bag will open. If your bag opens and loses your laundry, it can take weeks for the property offer to get around to answering your request for new duds. Sometime Wednesday afternoon the bags come back either steaming hot and burnt, soaking wet and smelly, or my favorite, microwaved, steaming hot on the outside, wet and cold in the middle.
I favored buying extra bars of soap from the canteen, so that once a week I could wash my clothes in the shower. It wasn't uncommon to see me walking to the showers fully dressed. No, this wasn't to thwart off those who might seek to follow up on my dropping of the soap, it was so I could scrub my clothes clean and avoid the possibility of the laundry leaving me with only one outfit.

These days, post prison, I am grateful for the opportunity to use a washer and dryer, as I am grateful for the opportunity to do just about anything without being strip searched first. rara, God bless her, uses a Yahoo group called Freecycle whenever we need to downsize, or are ever looking for something, like wine glasses, hiking boots, chairs, desks, bulletin boards, or Brita water filters. In Nahant, she got us a washer for free--and it screamed and hissed so loudly that sometimes we had to turn up the TV or leave the apartment entirely. Now, since she started bathing with our dirty laundry, things are showing up around the apt that she hoped I wouldn't notice, like the Laundry Spinner and the drying rack. I might have to shank her.