Loaves, Fishes, and David's Undershirts

I had to do the laundry again yesterday. It wasn't a big deal this time. We've recovered from the long road trip and the tons of laundry produced by it.

I like to do laundry on Monday mornings. I am usually the only one in the laundromat. Occasionally, a man living at the nearby YMCA might come in with a small load, or a woman might drop by to pick up her AVON order from the lady who works there.

I entered the laundromat with a full laundry hamper and a full mkuh bag (the name David uses for a canvas bag with my initials stitched on it). This is a typical load for us. I sorted the laundry into the front loaders: two loads of color, one load of white. Our white loads, now that David's office has gone casual year-round, are typically underwear, tube socks, towels, and David's undershirts. Back when we had dress shirts to deal with and in the summer when I wear a lot of white t-shirts, we could do two white loads.

These are important points to make due to my recent complaints about David's undershirts. I hate folding his undershirts. David and I have different ways of folding our clothes. At about the nine year mark of our relationship, we decided to stop trying to get the other to fold according to our individual patterns. So, if David does laundry, he folds my laundry my way, and I grant him the same courtesy.

The thing is, there are always so many undershirts to fold! And to top it off, David's method for folding makes the undershirts lopsided squares – thus creating leaning towers of undershirts on the folding table. Once, when I tried to counter the effect by alternating the way I stacked the undershirts so that the bulky sides balanced each other (my Dad is an engineer), David requested that I cease and desist as it affected his morning procedure for removing the undershirt from the drawer, snapping the undershirt to its unfolded state, and slipping his arms and head through in one motion.

I have started to count the number of undershirts. If I do laundry approximately once a week, there should be no more than, say, nine undershirts per trip, right? Yesterday, I folded 12 undershirts.

Typically, I would complain, David would claim innocence, and we would move on.

However, yesterday was a different story.

Yesterday, when I had folded the last undershirt, matched and folded all of my socks, matched and balled up all of David's socks, and started to reload the hamper and mkuh bag with clean laundry – the laundry did not all fit!

This is an anomaly. Usually, the clean, folded laundry takes up much less space than the dirty, balled up laundry. Logical, right? I walked into the laundromat with two containers of dirty laundry, and left the laundromat with three containers (my backpack was enlisted to help) of clean laundry – just as Christ's apostles started with one basket of loaves and fishes and ended up with multiple baskets of leftovers.

I know that the hamper and mkuh bag did not get smaller as I could not fit all of David's undershirts into his drawers when I returned home.

I can't explain it.