Conway Daily Sun, page 11. Conway Police log, entry dated Friday, January 7, 5:35pm-
"A woman reported someone stole laundry from Seavey Street Laundromat in North Conway on Thursday."
Yes, folks, I live in a small town. As a matter of fact, the Maine town that I live in does not even have a newspaper and relies on neighboring North Conway, New Hampshire to tell us that someone's underwear is missing from the dryer...
The entry, however, captured my imagination. First of all: motive. It couldn't have been that someone needed socks & underwear and the usual assortment of well-worn clothes that get thrown into the weekly wash. Y'gotta understand that North Conway, a border town in sales tax free New Hampshire, is a retail mecca. If you were going to STEAL something, it wouldn't take more than a few minutes and a couple working brain cells to steal NEW underwear from a store. Believe me. I work in retail, and I know what shoplifters get away with.
Of course it could have been some perv who gets off on caressing someone's well worn undies. There's always that possibility.
But, being the daydreamer that I am, I can't help but imagine something a tad more poetic.
Imagine a cold and lonely person.
January is a cold month, oh so cold.
Now imagine this person, this cold & lonely soul, taking temporary solace in the North Conway laundromat on Seavey Street. Just for a few minutes. Just because laundromats are warm and suffused with the comfort of everyday ordinariness. No one does their laundry in a crisis. People do their laundry when everything is OK. Sit down for a few minutes & feel OK.
Chairs are in front of the dryers. Metal chairs, connected in a row like the ones at airport waiting areas, except older and with no cushions. Clothes tumble, pleasantly hypnotic. Get lost in the tumble.
Buzzer sounds, clothes collapse. They've gotta be warm. Soft and warm. They've gotta smell sweet, and fresh- after all, you saw that scented dryer sheet tumbling along. No static. It's as if a baker took a pan of warm chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, and placed it right in front of you. Can't-help-yourself-gotta-hug-the-clothes. Do it. Delicious-warm-sweet-warm. Can't let go. Kidnap the clothes.
And no one thinks to report it till the next day.
.
2 comments:
Wow, that's a slow news day, even for a small town.
I hope it was for the reason you dreamed up. I really do.
More likely it was a mundane case of laundry neglect. The woman probably left it in the dryer, the dryer finished, someone else wanted the dryer and unceremoniously dumped the load in a place the neglectful laundress least expected.
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