the lint in my life

I've always hated doing laundry. I hate washing clothes. I hate drying clothes. I hate ironing clothes. And if it were considered socially acceptable, I would never wash another garment and walk around in filthy, stinking attire for the rest of my clothes wearing days.

Unfortunately, I tend to enjoy human contact. Thus, I force myself to launder.

As a kid, the whole laundry process seemed quite fun...especially the drying portion. My mother would let me throw the sheet of fabric softener into the dryer which, at the time, I considered to be the most important aspect of the whole thing. And then she'd put me in charge of the Removal of the Lint...the thing that made laundry so intriguing.

I'd pull out the lint tray and carefully peel away that fuzzy concoction contained therein. And, unlike belly button lint or toe jam lint, the drying machine lint was perfectly clean...having just gone through the wash.

I'd marvel at the fluffy white mass in my hands, much like a miniature cumulus cloud which, depending on the amount of dark clothes that had been in the wash, had varying shades of gray...as if threatening rain was on the way.

Of course, I was only a kid and my attention span was limited. So the appeal of lint only lasted for a few seconds before I became bored with it, crumbled it into a ball, and tossed it into the trash. But for those few seconds, lint was possibly the coolest thing in the world.

And even now, removing lint is the highlight of my clothes washing chore...the only redeeming quality about the whole process.

Lately, though, I've been quite disappointed, because rather than the fluffy white/gray lint that I remember from my youth, the lint I get from my clothes nowadays is neither fluffy nor white. Rather, its quite flat and has a purple tint to it. Which is all the more confusing because I don't own any red or purple clothing.

Granted, I have one maroon bath towel, but this towel doesn't go through every wash cycle...and could one single towel taint the total lint production? I simply can't imagine that this one towel is solely to blame. So why is my lint lacking?

But each time I peel the lint off my lint tray, I'm left looking at a flat, purpley looking mess. It's not billowous or cottony at all...which I always thought was the natural state of lint.

I've always hated doing laundry. And now it's become even more unbearable, because even the lint isn't as exciting as it used to be.