I had such a good idea last Sunday morning.
I already knew I was going to be home all day, having planned a lovely venture into my studio to do art. I had all the pieces I needed ready to go for a few good hours playing. A perfect day to imagine and create. Why not wash my down pillows first and hang them out to dry so they’d be all fresh and fluffy by bedtime?
I filled the washer with nice hot water, a bit of detergent and even a splash of bleach in order to kill all the dust mites and other creepy things people tell you live in your pillows. With the humidity here in San Pancho in which all manner of things grow in abundance, it’s never a bad idea to do a deep cleansing now and then. Then, since I was going to use bleach, why not throw in some dainties and the pillowcases and a few other white-whites while I was at it?
So I did. I let them all agitate on gentle cycle, pushing the pillows down into the water now and then so as to saturate them. Then I went outside to my emails. I heard the washer stop, preparing to drain and spin before the rinse cycle, and decided to go in and tend the load.
I opened the lid of the washer. “Huh?” I asked aloud. It looked as if someone had filled it with bacon grease or some other thick grayish sludge. And then, “Oh, no no no no no..!”
The wash water was thick as pudding. One of my pillows, I concluded in dismay, had exploded in the machine. The water was feather tapioca…all the way to the bottom. I checked.
Grimacing, I pulled out a random piece of clothing. It was covered entirely with feathers, which might be nice if you’re an Aztec warrior which I'm not.
What to do? I couldn’t let the washer continue its cycle. It was about to drain, and who know what horrendous thing would happen if my washer was clogged entirely with feathers. I emptied out a plastic bin nearby and pulled each dripping item out of the sludge.
I tossed the two remaining pillows, heavy with soapy water, into the laundry sink which thank heaven I have one of, as it turned out. I came across the offending ex-pillow, which wasn’t even an old one. It was a fairly new Ralph Lauren that I bought cheap at TJ Maxx last time I was in the States. It had a big rip in the fabric from whence every last one of its feathers had flown the coop. No wonder it was cheap.
Gug. I got my plastic kitchen strainer and started straining the feathers from the water. Pretty soon I realized that wasn’t going to work at all. So I removed the two sodden pillows from the laundry sink, put a bigger strainer over the drain hole, and started bailing. First with a plastic pitcher, maybe a half gallon at a time, dripping across the floor and counter top to the sink.
As I poured feather soup through the strainer and scooped the remaining icky gunk into a plastic bag, I found myself talking to myself, as I often do. I was grumbling about losing studio time for such a stupid task from a stupider idea.
I said to myself, “You can’t tell anyone about this. This is the kind of thing that makes people roll their eyes behind your back and make cuckoo circles with their fingers when you’re not looking.”
Then, as I chatted further with myself, I began to hear another voice in the background--the voice of the late great Erma Bombeck, whose domestic humor, culled from the most mundane of moments, used to crack me up. I remembered laughing on the phone with Richard only a few days ago about our favorite episodes of I Love Lucy. I thought of Lucy and Ethel making a fiasco of popcorn in the apartment kitchen, of Lucy setting her putty nose on fire lighting a cigarette.
I said to myself, “You have a choice. You can either tell no one about this...or you can tell everyone.” So, what the heck: I took some pictures.
Pretty soon the water in the washer was too shallow for the plastic pitcher, so I switched to a big yogurt container, then to a small one. The bag of wet feathers was now lining an old trash can. Wet feathers are real heavy, and gloppy. I glopped the strainer into the bag over and over until the washer was as empty of water as I could manage.
I mopped the remaining feathers out of the bottom with a Costco paper towel which thank heavens I had some of. I wiped muck off the sides of the machine, revealing hundreds of tiny holes clogged with feathers. Okay, fine, now what? I picked at a few of the holes, extricating skinny clumps of wet feathers. For a second or two, I considered getting my work tweezers out of my tool box, or maybe a needle nose pliers. Then I took a second look at the zillion holes and flushed that idea.
I figured it was either call the appliance repairman, and he wouldn’t come ‘til tomorrow anyway, it being Sunday, or try a few things now and worse came to worst he’d have a bigger job when he got here. So I filled the machine and put it on rinse cycle.
While it was filling, I took a look at the soggy clothes in the bin. How in the heck was I going to get all those feathers off of them? Some of the little feathers were poked right into the fabric! I had an idea. Maybe if they were dry it would be easier, and anyway the dryer’s job is to take lint and stuff off of clothes, isn’t it? How about I just throw ‘em in the dryer for a while and see what happens?
The washer finished rinse cycle number one. I swabbed out the inside again. It didn’t seem like there were any fewer feathers than the first time. When I was done with that, I started another rinse cycle and checked the dryer.
Omigod, what a mess. Now the whole inside of the dryer was plastered with damp feathers and the clothes didn’t look any better at all. I took the clothes out and got some more paper towels, wetting them in the washer water. I had to bend way over and look up inside. There were feathers everywhere, all stuck to those rib things and the little holes in the back of the dryer that go somewhere.
Well, shoot, didn’t the lint filter do anything at all? I opened it to check and was immediately inundated with a sneeze of tiny fuzzy white feathers that flew into the air and coated everything in the room.
What am I going to do with these clothes? I wondered. They’re still all feathery. I have to shake them out somewhere, but not in my yard. I’ll do it in the street. After all, eighty free range chickens live within a block of my house. Nobody will even notice some more feathers in the street.
I went outside with my pile of dampish white clothes, put them on the front step where the neighbor dogs sniffed carefully to see if they were food, then I shook each piece energetically, making a nice snapping sound. The dogs looked at me sideways and left. After about the third item, I started to itch as if I were being attacked by fire ants. I hurried and finished then ran back inside and had an emergency face wash at the kitchen sink as I had feathers in my eyes. Also pinfeathers up my arms and down the front of my shirt and on my keys.
I went back to swabbing out the dryer. Then suddenly I remembered, “I have a vacuum cleaner!” And it’s a Shop Vac that won’t freak out if it encounters one of the puddles on the floor from dripping laundry! I plugged it in and turned it on the dryer. Whoa! That’s more like it. It swallowed up feathers like a hungry dog snarfs kibble. I vacuumed the entire laundry room floor and baseboards too, although I realized this was likely premature based on the remaining feathers to be accounted for.
I put the clothes back in the dryer for a while and swabbed out the washer again, turning it on for rinse cycle number three. It seemed to be regurgitating new feathers each cycle, which I was conscientiously removing and dumping in the can. Most of the little holes were unclogged now, and the feathers were getting finer each time. I figured that was probably a good thing.
I had now spent two hours on this unexpected project and thought I was maybe half done.
The clothes in the dryer were better but still had fine feathers all over them. I decided to throw them in rinse cycle number four, but when I took them out of the dryer I noticed my favorite white pants had feather clots in all the pockets. I turned the Shop Vac on. Probably a little too powerful for the job, I thought, as it began sucking up my linen pants. I wrestled them back out of the nozzle and picked the feathers out myself. Then I cautiously opened the lint trap just the tiniest bit and jammed the vacuum nozzle in there to slurp out all the dry feather fluff, which it did rather nicely.
I still had to deal with the two intact pillows. I rinsed them well under the laundry sink faucet, still straining feathers so as not to further clog the drain, and took them outside to drip for a while. The sink was full of strainers and containers, so I carried them into the kitchen to wash later.
The kitchen floor was adrift with feathers dancing in the breeze. As I shop-vacked them up, bent over at the waist as I had not bothered to put the extender thing on the hose, I saw that it seemed to be snowing white feathers from somewhere. Turned out they were coming from my hair, so I vacuumed it a little too.
I’d totally given up on any idea of getting down to the studio today. I emailed Richard and asked him, just out of curiosity, if he’d read our horoscope this morning, as he gets one on his MSN homepage and shares it with me sometimes. He sent it to me right away. The first line said, “Some rather depressing information could come your way today, Aquarius…” Hmmph. Nothing about the information coming from a washing machine, I noticed.
The washer was still rinsing feathers off my clothes, so I re-vacuumed the laundry room. I wiped out the laundry sink and toted the trash can, which weighed as much as I do, out into the sun in hopes some of the water would evaporate. I heard the washer stop.
I opened the lid. Picked up a random article of clothing. It was soaking wet. So were all the others. “Huh?” That didn’t seem right. They should have been all twisted from the spin cycle. They weren’t.
I turned on only the spin cycle. The motor came on, sounded fine. But nothing happened. No centrifugal action. No spinning whatsoever. I jiggled the tub and moved it in an encouraging way. Nothing. Nothing at all.
So I went to the beach and had dinner with Judith.
Monday morning I called Rubio's, the appliance repair people. They came. I told them about the feathers. They shook their heads and took my washer away to the appliance hospital.
Wednesday morning they brought it back. “What did you find?” I asked. “Nothing, it’s fine,” the nice young man replied. “Feathers?” I asked, reticently. “Mucho,” he replied, grinning.
I paid him 680 pesos, a bit over fifty dollars. That was an expensive pillow, I mumbled to myself as the guys turned on the washer and showed me how well it was spinning. Then again, it probably would’ve cost twice that just to have an appliance repairman show up at the door in the States. These guys had even adjusted the clutch. I gave them a nice tip.
Then I gave myself a nice tip: keep your feather pillows out of the washing machine. I’ll bet someone out there has some other nice tips about what I could’ve done to prevent the washer from clogging. If you do, just keep ‘em to yourself, would you?
And if you see me walking down the street with little feathers poking out of my clothes, please wait 'til I pass to do the cuckoo circles. I’ll be watching.
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This post is dedicated to Jeanie in Arizona, whose washer has also been on the fritz.
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