about molly | art | writings | contact | home the avra valley dispatch: 7 January 2004 Monday morning was clear and sunny and the safety glass just twinkled across the floor of the Laundry-Jail. It was really quite pretty -- like a diaspora of teeny swarovski crystals escaped from a thousand pairs of sassy thongs, setting off for distant lands across the dingey concrete. And you know whoever punched in the dryer window this week will be the first to moan and groan when they are one dryer short next week. The Laundry-Jail is my local laundromat. It is an uninsulated cement block structure with a concrete slab floor, some electrical wiring for the machines -- but no lighting, and doors and windows fashioned from grids of re-bar.Hence, Laundry-JAIL. There is one big table to fold your clothes on, a long-ago broken soap machine all rusted and scribbled upon, no magazines (not yet, I'll take my old Harper's up there and see how well that goes over), and no chairs. But it has hot water -- something my washing machine at home does not have. When I moved to California years ago, I thought it odd that many people kept their washer and dryer in the garage. In Arizona, it's common for people to keep them on the back porch. This is where mine is. Although, since my house was put on the lot facing backward, it looks like the washer is on my front porch...the first thing you see when you come up the lane. Very classy, no? As there is no hot water faucet outside, my washer runs on only cold. That is, when it did run. It was prone to bouncing around during its spin cycle and one of its hops across the porch put a permanent cramp in its side. I fixed my swamp cooler. I nailed the roof back on my barn. I built a javelina-proof traschcan corral. Taking apart a washing machine is a little beyond me right now. Maybe when it's warmer and my fingers aren't numb and clumsy, and there are more plants in my yard that will appreciate the runoff from the spin cycle. Until then, I go to the Laundry-Jail. There is a bird's nest in one of the holes punched in the sheetrock. The doors are "locked" each night with red plastic drinking straws tied through the re-bar; weeks' worth of snipped straws litter the ground outside the building. Someone's carved into the side of a dryer -- I call it the soap opera of the Laundry-Jail: "I love Steve" inside a big heart. An addendum a year later: "we had a baby girl - Sadie". Another addendum a year after that: "I miss him". ::