By Jennie Montgomery
Sky Baby is having the most adventurous summer. She’s working as a counselor at a Methodist camp near the North Carolina coast. She’s learned a lot about wildlife (frogs, snakes and seagulls)…and laundry.
She was warned by veteran camp counselors that washing her clothes on site would turn them brown so she drives to a laundromat in the nearby town every week to do a load or two.
Now, Sky’s exposure to laundromats is pretty much limited to the washers and dryers in the basement of her college dorm. Taking her clothes to a free-standing laundromat is a new thing and she’s been really observant about the differences between a business venture and a basement necessity.
She described the setting as a clean and bright big store.“It’s peaceful there. Quiet. I can just read or listen to my music until my clothes are ready,” Sky explained.
But that’s not all:
“It has a glorious bathroom,” she explained, “it’s so big!” (Glorious?? Could that possibly be the first time EVER that a washroom has been called glorious?)
The place is filled with rows and rows of washing machines and dryers.
“There’s even a play area for the children, with a little gate around it.”
“And they have changing tables all over the place!” she said.
That let me know right then and there that this girl’s been breathing too much fabric softener.
“Changing tables?” I laughed.
The mental image of a dozen bare-bottomed babies laid out on those tables was just too much!
“SKY!! Those tables are for folding clothes when you take them out of the dryer—NOT for changing diapers!”
“Oh.”
(Seriously? “Oh” is all I got out of that?)
“Did I tell you all of my 14-year-olds last week were taller than me?”
(I see what she’s doing…changing the subject here.)
“One of the Dads walked over to me and said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but how old are you?’ I told him I was 20.”
“Oh, thank goodness!” he said, “cause I would have believed you if you had said 16.”
Ha ha! The image of a 16-year old in charge of eight 14-year-olds was almost as funny as those bare-bottomed babies!
This article appears in the August 2016 issue of Augusta Family Magazine.
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