growing up

day two of year forty nine

Day two of forty nine and I’m still plugging through everyday everything. A thought did strike me, however, when I was loading laundry into our washer, careful these days not to shut the door after learning that it locks in smells (mildew, etc., ), that I should probably clean out the drain in the front of the machine. I don’t remember our machine, as a kid, having a drain in front. I also don’t remember it ever smelling. Our old machine had a drain and after a few years of exasperation that there was a weird smell in the laundry room I finally decided to get to know my machine. Ugh. This was short lived because after the connection was established, me cleaning out the putrid drain, the damn thing stopped working. I know, I questioned this whole scenario as well, but when something smells that bad — I don’t know — some sort of action is required.

After the untimely death of the first machine, the next one I vowed would never sit with its door closed and I would always clean out that nasty drain thing. So today I did that. It was gross. Not that it had ridiculous gunk or anything but the smell, I can tell you, was one of the worst I had ever smelled. I’m saying this and for a decent validation of my smell tolerance, I can say I’ve actually gone to a very cool (weird) Swedish ceremony where they open, under water, a fermented fish that smells so god awful that they have to do this outside. It’s an actual thing. I have a t-shirt from our way too cool host that made us privy to this very random but cool cultural experience. I think I should invite Stefan over for the American tradition of cleaning out our washing machine front drains. (We can’t actually make that a thing but it does rival the fermented fish).