The Tactile Pleasures of Reading and There will Always be Laundry

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
DAY 2236: January 2, 2019
Prompt: My grandmother always said that what you did on New Year's day you would be doing for the rest of the year. What did you accomplish on New Years day? Will you be doing it the rest of the year?

Laundry...that is what I spent my New Year day doing...and most certainly what I will be doing for the rest of the year and all the years of my life to come. There will always be laundry...oodles of mismatched socks, soiled doggie diapers, changes of barely worn clothes discarded by my fickle daughter and sodden towels left on the floors and draped over the backs of chairs. There will always be damp swimsuits and grass-stained jeans. There will always be grease covered sweatshirts and hairy, smelly doggie beds. It will never end for me. I know this with a rare certainty. For the most part, I embrace the chore. There is something satisfying from turning a heap of dirty, soiled garments into a fresh, crisply folded pile of clean clothes and towels. I feel accomplished once the various laundry baskets are emptied and all the cleaned laundry is put away again. No matter that the baskets don't stay empty, or that the dirty cast offs sometimes fall just short of the basket's wide, easily accessible maw. This is my task to bear, mostly because entrusting it to another member of my household would certainly spell disaster; like the time my visiting mother-in-law managed to shrink all three of my pairs of maternity pants, or the time I found my husband had folded and put away an entire load of laundry that was still damp.

So yes, this New Years..and all on those blessed ones to come...there will be laundry.



"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 1843 January 2, 2019
Prompt: "Open a volume and next comes fragrance: fresh, green and inky if it's new or a bit dusty and aged like a grandfather's cozy den" Which do you like better, new books or old books?

This is a tough call. I have always loved the texture and smell of old books. Near my new home there is place called the Book Barn that has a seemingly endless series of rooms and outbuildings filled with books. Some of them are very old volumes, their covers mottled with mold. I love looking at those books, imagining all the hands they've traded to and from over the years. Then there is a this inherent joy with cracking the spine of a new book, that fresh ink smell and the crispness of pages not yet thumbed through. I love being the first person to take a new book out of the library. It feels like a secret privilege of sorts. I have never wanted an e-reader for these reasons, there is something so tactility satisfying about reading physical books that you loss with those electronic devices.