Reverie

When my sister and I were in elementary school, we got to spend a good deal of time home alone together.  She's 18 months, 9 days, and 17 hours older than me (taking Daylight Savings Time into account), so we generally found things to do together and were fairly close in size.  One of our best games was Procrastination.

We played Procrastination a lot.  I think one of the reasons we were so talented at the game was that we had the television as the focus of our home.  It made it really easy for us to vegetate.  Seriously, our family friend who lived down the alley from us had nicknamed us the Tater Sisters and even dedicated a teen horror novel to us as such:  To Vanessa and Jessica S***, the Tater Sisters.  (Vanessa was Spud, and I was French Fry.)  There are all kinds of great photos of us in various stages of melted-human posture, watching TV in our bathing suits and Dad's motorcycle helmets.

Since both our parents worked full time, we were tasked with doing a great percentage of the household chores.  In a spirit of familial responsibility and pride, we did these chores at the last possible time, as quickly and poorly as possible.

Vacuuming sometimes was merely a matter of leaving beater-bar tracks on the carpet.  Washing dishes was an exception to the "poorly" concept, however, particularly after (as my sister later claimed when relating the story to me) I apparently left too much soap on the dishes in the rinsing process and gave the whole family diarrhea.  We put off scrubbing the bathtub and the bathroom floor as long as possible because, frankly, it was disgusting work.

However the chore that was the most fun of all was doing the laundry.  Oh, sure, you think sorting is a pain, but we didn't do much of that.  Putting it into the washer and dryer wasn't all that bad because we just used the maximum settings for everything.  Folding, on the other hand, was a real chore.  But with a certain amount of imagination, and excessive efforts of delay tactics, folding laundry could be awesomely fun.

When we washed the sheets, we couldn't help but notice just how much our stuffed animals and dolls seemed to feel left out of the process.  So Vanessa and I would load up every puppet, animal, and doll we had onto a sheet.  This was an all-important part of the folding process because, um, it was.  We'd each take two corners of the sheet, then, and shake it up and down until all of its load had been ejected.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.

I know what you're thinking:  Ew, you did that with dirty sheets?  No worries there, folks:  we only played the doll-tossing game with the clean sheets, usually over the vacuumed carpet.

Clothing was generally less interesting to fold.  You can only try on your mom's bra and your dad's underwear and socks so many times before the fun sort of drains away.  Instead, we took advantage of the large play arena afforded us in our folding station:  Mom and Dad's bed.  This king size monstrosity could hold a LOT of clothing, which conveniently could be shaped into various mounds and islands.  Being a few feet above the ground, the bed also served well for demonstrations of gravity.  Vanessa and I were expert gravity testers.

How gravity is tested:  the thing you have to remember when testing gravity is that you need at least two people.  Luckily we had that requirement met.  One player is absurdly affected by gravity and continually falls (slowly) off the edge of the bed.  The other player is tasked with rescuing the faller.  For added dramatic effect, wails requesting help or fear of what might lie on whatever alternate reality the floor was assigned to be could be assimilated into the game.  This was a seriously dangerous line of work, however, but our injuries were seldom anything worthy of reporting.

Most adults don't seem to enjoy doing the laundry.  I think maybe it's because now that we've grown up, we've forgotten how much fun folding laundry can be.  Clearly we're doing it wrong.