Blog 2144 – 08.29.2021

Laundry Day

For many, Sunday is The Lord’s Day and they spend a good part of it in church, or resting, and relaxing with family. The last almost ten years of my life I have spent working on the road and Sunday has come to be Laundry Day as it is the one day more than any other that I have off work and can take care of cleaning, laundry, and such chores that I have less time to get done evenings after work. I have for the most part enjoyed my traveling life and have learned to enjoy and even look forward to laundry day.

Some honor one day above the others and think it more holy even as they view church attendance, weddings, birthdays, and funerals, as times more special or more holy. We are taught, most of us, to believe that some things are more honorable or holy ways of occupying our time. To memorialize people, things, or certain happenings or achievements we set aside certain days will call “holy days” or holidays.

Most of us live fairly predictable and routine lives in which we wake, wash, eat, work, sleep, and hopefully have a sprinkling of play time scattered in the mix, then wake the next day to do it all over again. We live for the weekends and holidays when we have more free time. All the work week long we make lists and plans about what we want to accomplish during our time off work. Often we need to get back to work to rest from our week end.

In just a few more months I plan to retire from this away on the road work life and to spend what years I have left with my lovely and loving wife Linda. We have a home without wheels in Houston, Texas. Linda grew up on her family’s farm in South Carolina that is near the small town of Bishopville and just a little farther away the larger town of Sumter. Someday, hopefully not too soon, when beautiful Betty, the matriarch of the family passes, the farm, now in a trust, will be divided among seven sisters and brothers, and Linda and I will get approximately her seventh share. There I hope to build us a little place to spend at least part of the year where she grew up and where we have vacationed so many times together over the years. We have so many wonderful memories of holy days spent there with family and loved ones.

Just as soon as this work assignment ends, probably late November or early December, I plan to pack up our little home on wheels and pull in to the Stokes Farm and store it in our dearly departed Wallace Mendel Stokes’ large metal shop building on the farm before heading home to Linda in Texas. When this Covid-19 business is better under control or hopeful wiped out, I want to take Linda on a special holiday to Paris, France. We have long wanted to spend a week of holy days in the City of Lights together. After that I hope Linda will be in agreement that we take our portable home on regular road trips around the country to see much of it that we have not yet seen.

I figure if our son Jay and his wife Lauren, our new daughter, make a baby or two we will want to spend at least part of the year close by them and our grand babies. We want to hold on to our home in Houston as long as that is feasible. We have already spent more than a few years driving or flying to Tennessee and South Carolina from Houston so our parents, all but Betty already passed, could see us and their grandchildren and we them.

Well, I have not said a great deal about laundry day, but it is an important holy day when the clothes we wear every day are washed and neatly folded for the new week ahead. It is a ritual that I have come to enjoy and to see as an act of faith and a holy duty. Cleanliness they say is next to godliness. It seems the Mormons are not the only ones wearing holy underwear. Moms always say put on clean underwear before you go out because you might be involved in an accident. I don’t guess they meant the underwear soiling kind of accident. That is a tale for another day.

Happy Laundry Day, Everybody.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

“This is the day that the Lord and I have made, we will rejoice in it.”