Lint From My Dryer

Lint from my Dryer

By Robert W. Pallard

I buried Lint in my back yard this morning. 

     I live in a small bungalow near the downtown of a one-street Central Florida town.  I purchased the house not only for the character of that downtown neighborhood, but because it was affordable as well.

     Ten years later I’m still tripping over the reasons for its affordability.

     One glaring example would be my laundry room.  Though attached to the main house, it was obviously built as an “afterthought” to that structure and has its own entrance facing the wilds of my back yard.  The door, long ago rotted off its hinges, lies skewed at an odd angle to the doorway.  The glass louvers are hanging half-in, half-out of their frame and reflect the sunset at all angles in the evening.

     It’s been like that for so long I have since started viewing it as a piece of art, more in character with the rest of the house than one of the bright, shiny new ones I once checked out at the local Home Depot.

     The laundry room contains a washer and dryer of course and my hot water heater as well.  The room is located so far from the front of the house that it takes five minutes for the hot water to get there when I’m trying to wash dishes.

     This house wins no awards for energy efficiency.

     The laundry room also serves double duty as storage for all the things that don’t fit in my small garage-less, attic-less, near closet-less home.  Besides the rakes, clippers, mulch, and other assorted gardening paraphernalia, most of my Christmas and Halloween decorations are stored on the two shelves just above arms reach.

     I should explain that one of my hobbies is decorating homes for Halloween parties.  I can put together no less than three different “Mad Scientist” laboratories at once.  My neighbor, Tom, once told me that while I was at work one day, he went into the room to borrow my rake.  When he was confronted by jars of hearts, kidneys and other miscellaneous body parts suspended in questionable liquids, he almost had a heart attack.  Tom said that if he didn’t know me better, he would have called the Police that instant.

     I also share this room with an assortment of the local fauna.  Mud wasps reside in the corners, paper wasps hang from the doorway and a garden variety black snake once spent a few months in one half empty bag of mulch.  I figure that they were around long before the house was built.  I try to respect their homes and they never seem to pay much attention to me as well.

     One winter a family of rats moved in. Now, since I have had pet rats in my lifetime, rat traps were out of the question.

     I found the rats very entertaining. They would hide behind the boxes of decorations with their tails hanging down thru the crack between the shelves and the brick wall. They would be so quiet while I was I doing laundry that if it wasn’t for the telltale tails, I wouldn’t even have known they were there. One day I discovered that if I pushed lightly on their tails, they would let out a squeak.  Each rat seemed to have his own individual squeak.  I could play them like a little rodent-tail pipe organ.  They soon caught on to what was happening and quietly moved on to a new home.  No more rats, no bloody traps.

     I do miss them though.

     One other thing that I’ve learned over the years is that in the winter when the days are short and darkness beats me home from work each night, I only do laundry on the weekends.  I’ve had a few heart stopping moments when reaching into the darkened space and surprising the hell out of a squirrel or George, the neighbor cat, who thought they had discovered a warm and quiet place to curl up for the night.

     One Saturday morning, business as usual laundry day, something happened that would change how I viewed doing the laundry forever.

     I had already washed one load, transferred the damp cloths to the dryer and set the timer to fifty minutes.  When I pushed the start button I was affronted with a horrible squeal, a grinding sound and then a very final thump.  Everything stopped.

     As I packed up the wet bundle of clothes to head for the local Laundromat, I had plenty of time to contemplate the expense of a new dryer after having just replaced the washer six months earlier.  It was impossible to keep up.

     The following Saturday, being the creature of habit that I am, I headed out to the laundry room to begin my weekend routine.  I didn’t make it any closer than five feet from the door to the laundry room.  The stench was overwhelming.  It took only a few minutes to come to the realization that the squeal and thump of last Saturday’s laundry was actually the final sound coming from one of my “neighbors” who had apparently taken up residence inside of the dryer.

     Now what was I going to do?

     It was another two weeks before I was able to even go into the room to try and remove the murderous clothes dryer.  Over any hour later I had most of the room emptied and had managed to single handedly wrestle the dryer into the back yard.  After having removed the back of the dryer, the problem was apparent.  It seems that a full grown opossum had managed to squeeze herself through the lint hose and made herself a home in the inner workings of the dryer.  Home for a couple of days that is.

     As I scraped and hosed bits and pieces of fur and bones from the machinery I realized that it wasn’t just one opossum.  A young female had chosen my dryer as a warm place to give birth.  The expense of a new dryer seemed to pale in comparison to the short life of these unfortunate baby opossums.

     That’s when I noticed a slight movement in the flexible dryer hose that was still attached to the back of the dryer.  It sure didn’t take long for something else to move in.  I began to feel like a low end slumlord with the only warm space available in the entire neighborhood.

    Imagine my surprise when I shook the hose and discovered that it had become home to one of the baby opossums that had actually survived that traumatic birthday three long weeks ago.  He was still alive, though just barely.

     After three weeks his coat had already begun to grow in.  He was a dusty, dirty grey color, about as flat as a dryer sheet but with one exception.  This pile of lint had teeth.

     I couldn’t just leave him like that.  I began the routine that I had done so many times growing up in the hills of West Virginia.  I mixed up a concoction of bread crumbs, milk and just a small bit of protein powder to be sure.  I gently placed him on an old dish towel in a shoe box and began a routine of force feeding him the concoction about every half hour or so.  After the fifth feeding, he was gone.

     I figured one of two things could have happened to him; either he regained enough strength to move on to a better hiding place, or George, the neighbor cat, had discovered him between feedings and that would be that.  From the horrors of birth in the dryer to the horror of death by cat, all in three short weeks.  What a short, horrible life.

     My attention once again turned to the offending dryer.

     Another hour, more hosing and three cans of Febreeze later, the dryer was back in the laundry room and seemed to be functioning normally.  Not to mention, I still had the six hundred dollars in my bank account.

     For many weeks after that I would arrive at work every morning, sniff my t-shirt coming in the door and then ask Marcie, our concierge, if I smelled like a dead opossum that day.  I had to stop.  It got to the point that Marcie would fall off her chair laughing every time she would even see me coming up the walk or sniff-checking my shirt.  I could only hope that if I really did smell like a dead animal that someone in the building would be enough of a friend to let me know.

     By late Fall, more strange and unusual events had settled in to becoming a part of my daily life.  Late night “conversations” were happening on a regular basis just outside of my bedroom window.  Some very unusual collections of unidentifiable something-or-others began showing up on my front porch.  And, strangest of all…..my underwear started disappearing!

     Now washers and dryers are well known for their sock eating capabilities.  It seems that every other laundry day you find one more sock without a mate in the sock drawer.  It’s one of those things everyone talks about but nobody has an answer for.  You just accept it and move on.  Missing underwear on the other hand, is harder to keep track of and you don’t even know it’s happening until, like your youth, one day it just isn’t there anymore.  You don’t even talk to your friends about it.

     That all changed one Friday evening when a friend and I were relaxing on my front porch, beers in hand, not thinking about much more than making plans for the weekend ahead.

     Lee broke the silence with “What’s that white thing in the bushes?”

     I, curious myself, proceeded to retrieve what appeared to be a pair of my own jockey shorts entwined in the branches.

     Have you ever tried to explain your underwear hanging in an azalea bush in the front yard to an already sarcastic friend?  Actually, I couldn’t explain it.  He still looks at me funny from time to time.

     Now, Tom, my next-door neighbor, often arrives home from work the same time as I do.  Sometimes we just wave, other times we stop to catch up on the latest neighborhood goings on.  He asked me if I ever had any problems with my pet opossum.

     “What pet opossum?” I asked.

     “The one that lives in your laundry room.  I see him most nights when I get home after dark,” he continued.  “He always runs back towards your laundry room when he sees my headlights.  Sometimes he and our cat George talk to each other between the houses.  It goes on for hours.”

      Well, that explains the late night “conversations” outside my window.  But, I’m pretty sure my underwear wouldn’t fit him.

     The next morning I decided that it was time to get to the bottom of all the mystery.  At least now, I had a few clues to go on.

     For the second time that summer I shimmied the clothes dryer away from the wall. I couldn’t believe what was waiting for me.  It was obviously home to something.  The basic “nest” itself was constructed of my Joe Boxers and two pair of my jockey shorts and a dish towel.  (One more mystery solved….sort of).  There were three partially eaten oranges, half a papaya, two mangoes, all from my yard, some chunks of completely unrecognizable substances and of course everything had a light coating of lint from the dryer.

     This could only be home to “Lint”, as I had become to refer to the poor hapless creature when relating the story of his birth and death by laundry room to friends and family.

     Lint, it seems, had survived that first traumatic three weeks of life.  He had a warm home, plenty of food and it seems as though he had become George’s best friend, and not lunch as I had suspected.

     In time we became quite used to each other.

     Sometimes I would disturb him while doing the laundry.  He would come out from behind the dryer, walk between my legs and out into the yard, grumbling all the way.

     Now, I’ve read that opossums live about four years in the wild, but never more than two in an urban environment.  Dogs, cats, unfriendly humans and of course, automobiles, see to that.

     Lint and I shared our lives for over three and a half years.  I don’t even know how he eventually died.

     I discovered his body early one Saturday in May.

     I was in my usual routine of  Saturday morning laundry.  I now had much larger loads of dirty clothes to carry out to the back of the house.  As I couldn’t afford to continually be replacing my underwear, I bought a larger hamper for inside the house instead.  After ten years I know the route without even looking.  Good thing, as this morning my arms were so full of laundry that I couldn’t even see where I was walking.

     Suddenly I was engulfed in what I can only refer to as a black hell of nightmare sensations, smells and sounds.  As I lay there on the ground collecting my wits and my scattered laundry, I tried to make some sense out of what had just happened.

     It seems my laundry room had been full of black vultures that had panicked the moment I had turned the corner and entered the room.

     There, stretched across the threshold of the laundry room was Lint, or what was left of him.  His left paw was stretched out, as though reaching for the only home he ever knew, my clothes dryer.

     I buried Lint in my back yard this morning.

     George watched warily from a bush at the back of my yard.

     Lint’s final resting place was the best place I could think of.  He’s buried up against the side of my house directly below the vent of my clothes dryer.

     I comforts me to feel that my friend Lint rests peacefully with the gentle sound of the clothes dryer on the other side of the wall, and a soft blanket of lint to keep him warm on those cold winter nights.

     I still don’t have a door to my laundry room.

     Don’t think I ever will.