Photo: Muriel de Sezel
Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble
Dear Diary,
Imagine...
- A bathtub.
- The tub's faucet running with warm water.
- Bubble bath being added... not a capful or two as recommended, but the entire contents of the bottle.
- Water... continuing to run... without stopping.
It's not hard to imagine a bottle of bubble bath accidentally falling into a tub, and then perhaps, through negligence, allowing the water with its bubbles to overflow and flood a room.
But imagine, instead of a bathroom... a laundromat.
- Swap out the bathtub for a front-loading washing machine.
- Switch the bubble bath to... Tide detergent in a box... the whole box.
- Add water into the mix, on a fixed cycle...
It was Dad who put his foot down and said, "No!" to having our broken washing machine repaired or replaced with a new one.
And Mom, with strong opinions of her own, who let it be known..."No machine? Then you do the laundry, Mister!"
I probably should have written that last bit in all caps with triple exclamation points at the end, but this was just the beginning.
Somehow, "Little Miss" (me, the 9 year-old daughter) was thrown into the mix and was made to join "Mister" in doing the laundry.
Which explains how Dad and I, never having done laundry before, ended up in a laundromat with 5 machine-loads of dirty clothes and no clue on how to get dirty clothes cleaned.
But Dad had a theory: "If a little is good, a lot must be better"... detergent-wise.
And so, he added a whole box of Tide to each of our 5 front-loading machines and hoped for the best.
The rest you can guess.
As the water in the machines rose, so did the soap suds, soon obscuring any sight of our clothes.
And still the bubbles kept coming...
Out from the gaps in the soap dispensers!
Out from the hoses behind the machines!
We stood. We stared. We were shocked, but stayed silent.
Until the bubbles foamed above the machines... peaking like snow-covered mountains and sloping across the entire back wall!!!
And then, like the bubbles, we could no longer be contained.
At first we giggled, then laughed, then guffawed, till the pain in our stomachs and tears in our eyes wore off.
What else could anyone do?
When the only other person in the laundromat, a young woman, eyeing us while waiting for her clothes to dry, got up from her chair, and inserted 5 coins into the laundry vending machine.
Out dropped 5 small plastic pouches.
Without saying a word, she then emptied the contents of the pouches: a pink liquid, into each of our 5 machines.
And poof! Just like that... the suds in those machines vanished, and our clothes reappeared!
The woman was a female Houdini!... and our savior.
Her trick?
The pouches, we later found out, contained fabric softener: apparently, liquid magic that makes bubbles disappear.
Laundromats & The Kindness of Strangers.
at
"Here and Next"
XOX... Dyan
