Out (just a little bit reluctantly) with the old

The previous owners of our first home, a small one-story Campanelli ranch in Framingham, left behind for us a cobalt blue shag carpet and a GE washing machine and dryer.

Eight years later, when we ourselves moved out of that same house, I was very happy to leave the blue shag rug behind. And I was happy to take the washing machine and dryer with us. In the first house, they were tucked into a tiny half-bathroom, but our big new house, they had their own room, with shelves and cabinets and a built-in ironing board. And when, after what was coincidentally the same interval of time again – eight more years – we downsized into a medium-sized house, the washer and dryer again accompanied us.

Today, though, we said goodbye. It was time. I don’t know how old they were, but assuming they were at least a year old when we moved into our first house, they were well over 20. And the last few years had been hard on them. The washing machine went through a long phase when it would come to a dead stop between the filling cycle and the agitating cycle, and wouldn’t start up again until its door was open and shut in a very specific way. No one else in my family bothered to figure this out; only I knew how to get the washing machine to run, and for some reason that made me feel somewhat honored and indispensable. Knowing exactly how to open and close the stubborn washing machine in order to get it to resume its cycle reminded me a little bit of being the only one who could soothe a crying baby during the night, or comfort a toddler as a vaccination was administered.

And not long after the washing machine became persnickety, the dryer began showing its age as well. 

Sometimes it would dry the clothes normally, but other times the heating component would fail to activate. It began to take more and more cycles to get the clothes dry. I turned the dial to one hour-long cycle after another, hoping each time that this would be one of the times it decided to heat the clothes as well as tumble them. I began allotting at least three hours to dry a load of laundry, then eventually more like three days. Once, after it had been functioning poorly for weeks, we went on vacation; when we came home ten days later, it worked beautifully, making me think it just needed a good long rest.

But then it stopped heating up altogether. Like any loyal mother, I made excuses for it. “It just needs extra time,” I told the rest of my family. “We need to be patient with it.”

“Just be sure to tell me several days in advance when you’re going to really need your baseball uniform ready,” I told my son Tim. “Three days should surely be enough to get your clothes dry.” 

“Mom, three days is the same amount of time it would take for the clothes to dry if you put them in the dryer and didn’t turn it on at all,” he pointed out logically. Right. The old “That and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee” argument.

Last month, our electricity company raised its rates significantly, and it occurred to me that we were probably spending a lot of money running our nonfunctional dryer over and over again. But I kept the thought to myself out of loyalty and the persistent belief that with just a little more rest and coddling, it would return to its old self. Then I went away for the long weekend. On Sunday evening my husband sent me a text. “Here’s your Valentine’s Day present!” it said above an image of a shining, state-of-the-art washer and dryer.

Earlier today, while I was at work, a delivery truck brought them. A crew installed them and hauled away the older iterations. I can’t pretend to feel truly sentimental about this. I hung on for as long as I could, but the thought of clothes that dry in one hour instead of three days is irresistible, and besides, I suspect that people were just too polite to tell us that we were all starting to smell a little moldy, as we went around in clothes that had never quite lost their core of dampness.

Out with the old; in with the new. It’s a new day in the laundry department. I’m happy about it. But my attachment to the old appliances was nice too, a thread linking us back to our very first home and our second year of marriage. Here’s to hard-working old appliances, and the undeniable vein of sentimentality that keeps me attached to them for what is sometimes far too long.

The scent of school

Maybe it’s because this unseasonably warm weather gives the sense that the end of the school year is closer at hand than it is, or maybe it’s because most of my volunteer duties at school – the seventh grade play, fourth grade band coverage – are over for the time being, and my next big school-related job – chairing the teacher appreciation luncheon in June – is still months away. But whatever the reason, I was feeling uncharacteristically sentimental as I made my way through the middle school hallway en route to the cafeteria to do my monthly stint as fourth grade lunch/recess volunteer yesterday.

There was a time when I thought any visit to the school would make me feel sentimental. It was my childhood school for nine years, after all, from kindergarten through eighth grade. And so when we started preparing to send Tim to kindergarten and I made those first few visits to the campus to learn about what kindergarten was like in Carlisle in the 21st century, I misted up with nostalgia. And I thought I’d always be like that.

But in the ensuing years, the wash of nostalgia has subsided. Now the school is no longer the setting of my ever-so-slightly-faded childhood memories; it’s the place where my children spend 180 days a year, and much of the sentimentality I once felt about sending them there has been subsumed in the reality that defines the ins and outs of public schooling. I genuinely believe we have a wonderful school system, and I am profoundly appreciative to be able to send my kids to this school. And yet the comparisons with sausage-making are inevitable: being immersed in the quotidian concerns of school life certainly takes away some of the dewy-eyed nostalgia. There are MCAS scores to contemplate, discipline issues to deal with, matters of friendship and bullying and everything that falls between the two to try to understand, and seemingly endless volunteer needs to help fill.

So my recent visits to campus have been a little less nostalgic than my earlier ones.

Yesterday was different, though. The sun was bright and the air warm; my job was to stand out at recess and keep an eye on the third graders. They played tag and soccer and had races; it’s easy to see how we have such a fit student population, given the time they spend running on the school plaza during recess. The smell of the middle school hallway reminded me of how happy I often was during my own days as a child there. I remember a feeling of excitement during so much of the time I spent at school: when I was younger it was about wondering what new opportunities would arise in the classroom from day to day, and then in middle school years it was more related to my social life, but there was always a sense that something interesting was about to happen. Even then, I found our school a comforting place and I was proud of it.

All of those feelings came back to me yesterday, replacing the general sense of weariness I’d developed over a long winter of dealing with school-related issues. Even during years as good as both my kids are having, in fourth and seventh grade, it seems there’s always something causing a little bit of turmoil.

But not yesterday. Yesterday, the school felt like the same engaging and cheerful place it had been back in first grade when my teacher created amazing murals with soap and washable paint on the classroom windows; back in fourth grade when friends and I wrote and performed our own play for the class; back in sixth grade when the posters went up for our first school dance. As I tell my childhood friends who did not move back to town and still have their own misty-eyed memories of our old school, it’s not Disney World. It’s a real place with both positives and negatives, and to get too nostalgic is to misunderstand how complicated a public school system can be in this day and age.

At the same time, sometimes it doesn’t feel complicated at all. Sometimes it just feels...well, like home.