Guy Smalley illustration • smmalleyart.com
Until my wife, Mary Pat, and I bought our first house, which included a dishwasher, our greatest ‘home appliance moment’ had been the purchase of a low-budget washer/dryer set.
With that $400 acquisition, we erased 6,000 future Sunday afternoons at the Laundromat, neatly excising from our lives the aroma of strangers’ moldy hampers, the blaring of fuzzy-screened televisions, and the echoing shrieks of hyperthyroidic babies. O, the joy of that debut wash and dry, as we peacefully sat on the couch watching the television programs of our choice, our laundry warm, safe, and snug in the next room.
Good times, how speedily they pass—much as a manufacturer’s liability for the breakdown of a low-budget, but emotionally high-end, appliance. And so, we found ourselves recently without a clothes dryer, per se, but with a bulky, off-white machine that no longer generates heat but just high-pitched squeals and a stench of burning rubber.
I won’t play our battered, tear-stained viola here, but we are not rich. Mary Pat is a school teacher in East Tennessee. I am a freelance writer. (Translation: I am indigent.) Given our finances, immediate dryer repair was impossible. This was a tragedy, because, while it is untrue that all the joy in our lives had been obliterated, an immense amount of joy was gone. But, at least, the clothes washer still worked. So, maybe, only 50 percent of all the joy in our lives had been utterly annihilated?
Or was that 25 percent? Because the dishwasher worked, too. And, being summertime, wasn’t it more a 15 percent elimination of joy? Because, as the song goes, the livin’ was easy: In summer, in Tennessee, a large, wet bath towel draped over a banister can dry in two hours.
However, as the eternal passing of an appliance warranty, so, too, summer gives way to fall. October arrived, and the days were cooler. The dryer remained silent. Budget pressures endured, but there was an unexpected bright spot. Over the summer, our electricity consumption had plummeted, thanks mostly to the dryer’s expiration. The utility board had included a complimentary note with our most recent, marginally reasonable bill.
Now, we are environmentally and socially conscious people, I think. We recycle. We caulk. We avoid using toxic chemicals. And Mary Pat leads the region in garden composting. We are doing our part. But we—well, me more than Mary Pat—are sometimes, very rarely, you understand, calculating and self-interested. Three months of energy savings reawakened our darker selves: Environmentally correct non-dryer revenue would fund an environmentally incorrect energy hog resurrection.
So, on a brisk October morning the repairman appeared, took his $100 of small coin (and some of it really was coin), replaced a belt, and declared the dryer operational. Imagine our great contentment in again loading the machine with wet towels, almost matching that maiden voyage 10 years previously.
But in our selfish, coal-burning excitement, were we reckless? Did we overfill the dryer? Only another, economically impossible visit from the repairman might answer those questions. All I know is that within two days the machine was producing the familiar high-pitched squeal and the stench of smoldering Firestones. Our clothes dryer was ... was ... was dead!
On our budget, a repair equals half the price of a dryer. Sadly, we had spent that amount already. Sadly, too, the local utility company, again praising our reduced energy consumption, had just raised its rates.
So we continue drying clothes on hangers, arranged on jury-rigged lines like tragic party streamers. The thing is, the situation isn’t—and never was—desperate. I mean, I work from home. Could the bar be set any lower? I could abandon wearing—let alone washing and drying—clothing forever, and who would know? Mary Pat, an actual grownup, irons her clothes, regardless of our dryer’s condition. And even with the electricity rate increase, this non-dryer arrangement is saving us a boodle, and, yes, I suppose, a small portion of a less polluted environment—and those facts must count for something. Dry clothes? Bah! Dry eyes? Absolutely.
And, who knows? Maybe we can take our next round of savings and buy a clothesline and a second iron.