My Nemesis

The ever present enemy: laundry. It lurks around every corner in my home, ganging up on me, waiting until that moment when I think I've conquered it to surprise me with a hidden pile in the downstairs bathroom or a monstrous stash horded for weeks under Brianna's bed or in the dark recesses of Gloria's closet.

Sometimes, I'm lured to the downstairs bedroom by a strange malodorous smell that I slowly track through the basement, sniffing the air like a hound, until I locate it coming from some exotic new location like the bottom of Danya's toybox, or hidden inside a board game that was roughly tossed into the closet.

On the days when I am completely overwhelmed, rather than surrender, I and my family gather up every single article of clothing of vaguely suspicious cleanliness and outright dirty status and pile it high in the back of the van. Then we haul it off to the laundry mat where we can line it up as if in a firing squad and attack it all at once for the price of some laundry soap and my life savings in quarters. But despite my best efforts, the laundry always wins in the end. For even though I have succeeded in washing it all, we are then too tired to put it away, or there is no room in the drawers. So there it sits, gloating in the laundry baskets, as it slowly transfers from the clean piles into the dirty hampers, reminding me that, when it comes to the war on laundry, the only true winners are the happy people on nudist beaches.