Laundry Day

I did laundry on Monday. I’ve been here a week and a half and I already needed to do laundry. And though I can’t believe that, it makes sense to me. There are hills. Hills, as far as the eye can see, when you can see past the rain. Everything I’ve worn in the past week and a half was damp due to one cause or the other and most of it had been sitting on a chair until I got a laundry basket the other day… you can see why laundry was the sensible thing to do. As my mother said when I was FaceTiming with her, some things never change.

Now, I always, in my heart of hearts, expect laundry day to include some of this:

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But it never does. Doesn't stop me from humming "My Freeze Ray" from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, though.

I met a Taiwanese girl who’s studying criminology while doing laundry and we talked about where we’re living. She’s in the residence hall section of the buildings while I’m in the apartments but they’re all so new and standard, she said it was like living in a hotel. And I have to agree, having lived in hotels for three years, though the hotels I lived in where a might roomier. It’s hard to make this place your own, to feel settled. 

I remember walking into my room at my parents’ house this summer and being pleasantly surprised when I realized that it smelled like me. It’s a weird awarenesses that you can’t get unless you’ve been away from a place long enough to lose your nose-blindness, but at the same time, it’s a really pleasant one. I can’t place what makes something smell like me. Maybe my detergent, which I left in Chapel Hill with at least 30 loads of laundry left in the bottle, or maybe my conditioner or body wash? But it was always a comfort. 

Now, with clothes and sheets freshly cleaned, my room smells both clean and like the air freshener I bought for the days before laundry and I suppose that’s all part of settling in. A year from now, the room will have lost its “new room smell”, probably, and will have taken on something more like me, whatever that means. And it’s a weird thought, to try to make this plain and standard room your own for a year, but then again, this is home. Whatever that means.