You know the old saying, “You never appreciate what you have until it’s gone?”  Well, I got a little taste this week, when my washing machine broke.  Now I will admit that doing laundry is right up there on my list of the ten most things I hate to do.  So I try to remind myself every time I am faced with an avalanche of dirty clothes to wash that I am blessed to have a washer and dryer instead of a flat rock in the river.

I was proud of myself for piling everything into the washer the evening before and setting the timer for the washer to come on in the middle of the night when the rates drop for electricity use.  Good steward and all that.  The next morning, when I went to transfer items to the dryer, I was dismayed to find everything sopping wet and full of soap.  I did the only reasonable thing I could – I told my husband.  Being a man, he took things apart, which released a flood of dirty water all over the laundry room.  (Not once, but twice!)  Now every towel we owned was pressed into service.  After cleaning out a ton of sand from the drain hose, along with a few Legos and two nails, we were optimistic that we had solved the problem.  Alas, no such luck.

So, off we schlepped to the laundromat with baskets full of wet items.  I was feeling quite annoyed at being so inconvenienced until I reminded myself I was blessed to have a laundromat within a few miles of my house.  An hour and a half  and eleven dollars in quarters later, we returned with clean, dry clothes – then we realized we had forgotten to empty the clothes from the washing machine and had only managed to grab all the soggy towels and a few things out of the hamper.

Meanwhile, my husband called a real repairman, who came out the next day (bless him) and pronounced that our pump (also full of Legos) had gone bad.  Unfortunately, we have to wait for parts until our washer (still sitting full of wet clothes) can be fixed.

I am once again reminded of how much we take things for granted.  Never again will I complain about doing laundry as I stuff clothes into my EC extra large capacity Kenmore washing machine.  (Okay, that’s probably not true.  I’ll most likely still complain.)  But it sure beats the laundromat and the flat rock in the river.  And the good news is that I can’t  do laundry this weekend!