It’s Friday (or almost, here on the West Coast) and time to meet up with Lisa Jo and the amazing Five Minute Friday girls. Take a trip on over to Lisa Jo’s to learn more about our writing with abandon and no editing!

Prompt: Laundry

Go.

It’s in a pile, against the wall and on the floor. The laundry basket is in the laundry room, a fitting place for it as a receptacle of the clean and dirty, never fully empty. Like the revolving door of housework and chores, work and motherhood that overwhelms and overtakes, stealing moments and years in a breath and tear. It is a reminder that I’ll never be caught up, and with the hubs on furlough, it hasn’t even been my job. But still… the mommy guilt kicks in. I missed the game and rushed to the conference. I held the babe and rocked him to sleep, just in time for him to dream his way to the sitter tomorrow morning. It is a reminder of the hearth and home, the calling of a woman to her brood, and the break that has happened from necessity and need.

Laundry. It sits, it piles. It lands in a heaping clump like my aching heart, and transitions to folded and smelling of lavender and petals, like my dreams. Sometimes it finds it’s way home, hung neatly in a closet or filed away in a drawer. Some days it’s lucky to make it to back to the bedroom before it’s pulled out of the basket and onto a body anxiously awaiting the next step out the door. And it waits. It waits for its turn through the cycle of this life, and it reminds me that it will all not get done today. Because just when I think I’m caught up, the boy falls splashes in a puddle and a pair of soggy jeans and a ratty T-shirt find themselves waiting for the washer. Waiting to be cleaned, pressed and find their home in a drawer. Just as I wait to be seen, to be washed clean and cherished, finding my home and my own place of rest.

Stop.