Our laundry (as a kid) had bigger piles than theirs, only ours had a horrible stench caused by:
Mom Only One Allowed To Do Laundry + Dirty Clothes + Pile up to Waists + Closed Environment + Clogged Sink + Overflow of Dirty Water + 5-Days of Summer Weather + Mildew/Mold = Gagging From Worse Smell You Can Imagine!
When I was growing up, none of us kids were allowed to operate the washer or the dryer. Mom’s rules, not ours.
Well, what happens when you have 6 people in one house and only one person doing the wash? Laundry was washed “as needed,” meaning we wore a lot of dirty clothes to school.
Daily, we would climb on this mountainous pile and pick through the clothes trying to find the “cleanest” (and forget about wrinkles at this point) clothes to where to school. We thought everybody lived this way.
We had an entire (dining room size) room devoted to laundry. Not just any laundry…lots and LOTS of DIRTY laundry. More laundry than poor Opal is looking at, that’s for sure! There was so much laundry you literally could no longer see the floor!
The mound of clothes grew bigger and taller and stretched from wall to wall, I kid you not.
All went “fine” until one day the (washing machine) sink became clogged and dirty water overflowed until the entire pile was soaking wet!
One day passed…then two…then 4…then 5…well, you get the drift…and so did anyone who came to our house! No wonder we rarely had company.
This horrible stench of the mildew-mix as it soaked into dirty clothes (gag!) is unforgettable!
Just picture if you can, the worst sour, nose-pinching, gag-inducing smell wafting through the entire downstairs…until my mom decided to keep the laundry-room door shut.
Yeah, that’ll get rid of the smell! Right? What a “great” idea. Keep it contained in the room! Enter at your own risk every every day(gag); That should make it better? NOT!
Unfortunately, it didn’t change the way my mom did(n’t) do laundry. She just went to a 2nd-hand store and bought (all 4 of us kids) MORE ugly clothes to be ruined the next time the sink overflowed.
I like that!