You can pick your nose.
And you can pick your friends.
But you can’t pick your friends’ nose.
That rhyme has rattled around in my head ever since I was a little kid. I don’t know why. So much other stuff doesn’t seem to be able to stay in there but that little ditty does. I always thought it was funny for some reason. The idea of picking one’s friends. It’s not the same with family. You can’t pick your family. They become attached to you the moment you are born. And they follow you for the rest of their lives. When I was much, much younger I used to wish that we could also pick family. One goes through a certain period of one’s life when FAMILY is either embarrassing, annoying or just plain irritating. It isn’t until you move far away from them that you realize just how important FAMILY really is.
Tag: Life Page 16 of 18
My views on it.
I did laundry today.
If you are alive and live in our modern world its safe to assume that you wear clothes. Perhaps, if you live in Florida, you probably wear fewer clothes than if you happen to live in Sweden like me. But since one can’t go around naked you will be wearing clothes of one sort or another. And if you wear clothes there is a really good chance that the clothes you wear will eventually get dirty. And unless you are someone who is a bit strange, you will also eventually want to wash your clothes. That’s what I was doing today. I washed a whole week’s worth of dirty clothes for 3 people.
Many years ago, when I first came to Sweden, I got invited to a dinner party. One of the guests there was a man who had spent some time living in the US. For some reason that I no longer remember, the conversation turned to American washing machines versus Swedish machines. This guy said that he felt that American machines didn’t do a good job washing clothes. After all, they only take 20 or 25 minutes for a complete wash cycle and they don’t have very high water temperatures. I couldn’t take this lying down. I asked him how dirty did he feel that his clothes actually got in this day and age. I said that 150 years ago, when most people worked in the fields, took a bath maybe once a month, and washed their few items of clothing when weather permitted, then, yes, clothes got really dirty and probably were very hard to clean. But today, we sit in offices, rarely working up a sweat, we generally shower every day and we own a lot of clothes, changing them often and washing them frequently. How dirty can they possibly get?
Now an average Swedish washing machine takes about an hour (sometimes more for the higher temperatures) to run through a complete cycle. It uses very little water and can wash at temperatures as high as 90 degrees centigrade (194°f). The wash tumbles around and around banging against the bottom of the drum as it falls down. I likened it to a mechanized version of when women (it was always the women) went down to the riverside to wash clothes by banging them against the rocks near the water. I guess this guy felt that high temperatures, a long wash cycle and hard treatment was what was needed to wash clothes. I think of that discussion each time I turn on a washing machine here.
In my apartment I have one of those washer/dryer towers in the guest bathroom. Not all apartments have them. If you don’t have one then you have to go down to the laundry rooms on the first floor to wash your clothes. In one room there are 3 washing machines in varying sizes and a large tumble dryer. The washing machines are not like the large American top-loaders. They are front loaders and once you close the door and start the machine, if you forgot to put something in, a sock let’s say; well, that’s too bad for the dirty sock – it has to wait for another machine load in order to be washed. In addition to the washing room, there is another room that has a big heat fan blowing into it and plastic-covered cables strung up above my head that you can hang clothes on so they can dry in the heated room. I usually let stuff dry for a bit in the tumble dryer, to get most of the wrinkles out and then hang them up to finish drying in the drying room. My building has a system whereby you book a day and time that you will be doing laundry by locking your laundry room “key” into the appropriate slot. There are 5 available times each day, seven days a week to pick from. It’s not permitted to do laundry after 11pm or before 7am. You might not always get to choose exactly the time that you want to do laundry because someone else’s key might be in the slot you wanted to take. But I guess that’s what you have to put up with if you live in an apartment building. It’s sort of like having to accept living next door to a noisy neighbor.
I started the previous paragraph by saying that I had my own washer/dryer in my apartment. So, if you were paying attention, you probably are wondering why I do laundry down in the laundry room. It’s because I like doing laundry down in the laundry room – or, at least as much as anyone can like doing laundry. Each week, I do anywhere from between 3 loads to as many as 6 loads of laundry. I will have the entire drying room filled with hanging pieces of clothing. I’m very organized about the way I hang stuff up. Things like my underwear that dry easily can be hung up in corners which don’t get a lot of heat. Things like jeans and heavy shirts get hung up right in front of the fan. And I’m very careful how I hang each piece up – I don’t just throw it over the cable. I carefully stretch it out over the cable so it hangs as straight as possible. I have a very strict no-iron policy in my home. If a few minutes in the tumble dryer isn’t enough to get rid of the wrinkles then it doesn’t get bought. If something actually manages to get past the no-iron radar then it rarely gets worn or it gets worn wrinkled.
After a couple of hours hanging in the drying room everything is dry and ready to pluck. Or at least, that is what I imagine I’m doing as I go through the room taking down the dry clothing. I imagine myself walking through an orchard picking apples. I then take the newly washed and plucked clothing to the mangle room. I forgot to mention there is a third room – the room with the mangle in it. 
A mangle here in Sweden is a machine that is used to press flat bed sheets, pillowcases, curtains, and tablecloths. The one in my mangel room dates back to the 40s when my building was first built. It’s now out of order and I have never used it. But the room has a long table that is perfect for folding clothes on. After folding all the clothes in neat piles I carry everything back to my apartment and I don’t have to think about doing laundry again till next week.
Now if you are still paying attention you will realize that I never said why I don’t use the washing machine in my own apartment. When we renovated our apartment 12 years ago I thought it would be great to have my own washer/dryer. Then I could do laundry when ever I wanted or decided to. And of course I did. I would be doing laundry 2, 3 or even 4 times a week. There was always some form of laundry in process. There might be wet stuff in the washer, drying stuff in the dryer, half dry stuff hanging on the rack, (even up in my apartment I didn’t dry clothes completely in the dryer because they either shrunk or got very wrinkled and I already told you how I felt about ironing), or piles of folded stuff waiting to be put away. I was doing laundry all the time! I was thinking about it all the time. I was at the mercy of dirty clothes! I had lost control of my life. I started to hate the sight of my laundry hampers! Five minutes after one hamper was empty it started to fill up again. I started to feel like the Greek king Sisyphus, doomed to push a huge rock up a mountain only to have it roll down to the bottom so that he would have to do it all over again, day after day. That was when I decided to go back to the peace of the laundry room. I might not always get the exact time I want but its close enough. While it does take me 5 or 6 hours from start to finish, its over in a day and I don’t have to think about laundry for a whole week. With my memory I usually am able to completely forget about dirty laundry until the overflowing hampers remind me that its time again. And if there is some sort of laundry emergency I still have the machines in my bathroom that I can fill up whenever I want to. Once again, I’m in control and for a recovering control freak like me, that’s a good feeling.
Last weekend, we drove out to our house in the countryside. It was the first time we had been there since winter started. November had been unusually warm and we waited till almost the end of the month to finally close up the place. Since we didn’t want to be paying for more electricity than necessary during the winter, we lowered the thermometers on the radiators to the lowest possible temperature, a few degrees above freezing, and we said goodbye till spring. Because we only have running water in the summer and that comes to us pumped up from a lake a few minutes away, the place is truly only a summer house. The water is only for washing and the pump needs to be taken out of the lake before it has a chance to freeze. Drinking water we have to get from a hand pump down the road. Our toilet facilities are equally antiquated – just an outhouse, which isn’t so much fun to use in the winter.
This winter, however, was one of the worst I can remember in the almost 30 years since I first came to Sweden. As soon as December started, it hit us with a fury. All through December, January, February, and even into March, temperatures rarely rose above freezing, often being far below and we have been covered with deep snow continuously even into April. So as we drove out to Stavsnäs, we were wondering how it was there. Here in the city, except for small patches on northern slopes and the slowly shrinking piles left from the snow plows, most of the snow is gone. But as we drove east towards the Stockholm archipelago, we saw more and more snow cover still on the ground.
At the bottom of the driveway is a mound of snow blocking our entry but after a couple of attempts, we get the car over the mound and drive up the hill. A soggy winter wonderland meets our eyes! In the middle of the property is a half-frozen lake. 
We see patches of deep snow in some places and bare ground or rock in others. Going from one place to another means hopping from one semi-dry patch to another semi-dry patch. Poor judgment results in wet feet but we make it to the house.
On the deck, in a line parallel to the house, just under the edge of the roof, is a high pile of snow. It’s what’s left from the snow that slid off the roof, probably all at once, when the weather got a bit warmer and the melting started. On the other side of the house is a similar pile and on that pile lies the steel-plate chimney that surrounded the kitchen fan’s exhaust pipe. The pipe itself is still on the roof but bent double. 
The chimney however, is a mangled piece of metal. It seems that the heavy mass of snow, as it slid off the roof took the chimney with it. We go inside to see if there was any water damage there but the wooden inner ceiling and the hole around the pipe seem OK. That’s a relief. We spend the rest of the afternoon spreading a tarp over the hole and tying it down till we have time to come out and do something more permanent about it. We will definitely be buying a new chimney. Oh, the joys of owning a house. Everyone we talked to about it, kept saying that we are supposed to periodically shovel the snow off the roof. Who wants to shovel snow off a roof?! That’s what I like about living in an apartment building in a city. Someone else gets to take care of that kind of stuff.
After a short walk all around the property to see if any trees have fallen down on anything important, we get into the car and head back to civilization.
I’m sitting in a small one-bedroom guest apartment in Monroe Village, the independent living place that my mom moved to, two years ago. I’m here visiting her for 2 weeks with my husband and son.
Monroe Village is in the wilds of middle Jersey, a place where once all you saw were fields and fields of farmlands – corn fields, potato fields, vegetables and even dairy farms – a landscape that probably contributed to New Jersey being called the Garden State. Its February and still winter, one of the worst and snowiest in a very long time. Snow is still lying on the ground though the roads and walkways here are clear. We picked up our rental car upon landing at Newark airport. We knew we would need a car here in the land of turnpikes, highways and roads of all sorts. My husband drives, my son mans the Tom Tom and I sit in the back seat watching the landscape pass by my window.
Everywhere we drive, the farms are being replaced by brand new housing developments. They are incredible to look at. The houses are huge! And the styles – a weird mix of fake stone fronts with vinyl siding on the sides and backs. Large fake Greek columns on the front porches. Steeped roofs sometimes with dormer windows. And did I say HUGE!? Who lives in these horrible homes of bad taste – the everyman mansions of our times. Families don’t have 10 kids anymore. How much space do you need? I would love to visit a model home just to see what the insides of these monstrosities look like. But I don’t really.
Spaced between the housing tracts are small white houses from the late 1800s or early 1900s with white clapboard siding and the classic American front porches. These houses sit right next to the highways. They were there first. Some have been lovingly renovated and others look like they haven’t seen a coat of paint in 50 years. There are also strip malls scattered around, so named because they had to differentiate themselves from the large covered malls that also are around. Along the highways are small buildings of every sort, home to law firms, plumbing supplies stores, hairdressers, pizza parlors, ice cream shops, and all the other types of places necessary to give the locals the services they need to live here. This is my “home country” – not this neighborhood specifically but I grew up in NJ. But as we drive around, I feel like I am traveling through a completely alien country. As I walk around the local Stop and Shop supermarket I look at all the varieties of stuff to buy. What should I pick? What is good? What is the difference between brands? We have a lot of the same brands in Stockholm – Kellogs, Planters, General Mills, Liptons, Pepsi, on and on. But not the diversification. Does one need to have 40 different varieties of cold cuts? Not to mention the varieties of breakfast cereal. I feel like a Russian immigrant landing on the shores of American for the first time. And the TV! We don’t have advanced cable in our little guest apartment, just the regular stuff. But its like a solid wall of sound. I can’t filter it.
When I wrote on Facebook that I was heading to the States, I got a lot of “welcome home” messages, but I’m a stranger in a strange land. While I spend time with my mom, I’m waiting to return home, to Stockholm.