Trouble with Towels

Chuckle #433 | December 8th, 2010
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I’ve been having towel trouble. I know, I know…as problems go this is a relatively minor one, but it is slowly sucking the joy out of my life; making me resentful of my family; and eating away at my normally happy-go-lucky nature.

All I seem to do these days is endless loads of laundry, half of which are towels. Yet the linen closet is nearly always empty. Wiped out.

I thought I could solve this problem by simply buying more towels. Rookie mistake. I learned that the more towels I own, the more towels I wash and the more indescribably annoyed I become.

Then I figured out that problem is not so much the towels as it is the people who use them. An infinite number of towels can be absorbed into the teenage lair. A teenager will choose the towel that is clean and folded over one of the five barely touched towels on their bedroom floor EVERY single time.

Hence the mania.

I honestly don’t think my kids have even noticed how obsessed I’ve become. Or maybe they have, and it’s all part of their “plan” to drive me so close to the edge that I don’t care about towels anymore.

If so, they are cleverer than I thought. But I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.

In the book Angela’s Ashes, 12 Irish immigrants in a NYC boarding house share TWO towels for an entire week. For hygiene sake they have some complicated rules about “top” use vs. “bottom” use, but somehow they make it work, because that is all they have. And therein lay the answer to my towel problem.

Fewer towels. (Or fewer teenagers, but my husband refuses to consider boarding school.)

So I sorted through my towel collection and kept just two towels per person. I assigned each person a color. I donated the rest. (Most of which were badly fraying anyway.)

If you’ve read Angela’s Ashes, you know that an allotment of two towels per person is downright generous. And the color coding makes it easy to identify the perpetrators of towel crime and punish them by making them dry-off with toilet paper.

Yes, I am both crazy and creative.

My new system was working great for a while. Then my son stopped doing his laundry. He took my husband’s towel; then he took my towel. He stashed said towels in his closet.

We searched for weeks for the towels that my son denied ever touching or seeing. I accepted his argument of plausible deniability since one, we couldn’t find the towels, and two; sleep-deprived teenage boys quite legitimately remember very little.

Meanwhile my husband and I got creative with hand towels.

We eventually found the stolen bath towels at the bottom of a stanky 4 foot pile of laundry in my son’s closet. I ranted; I complained; I whined. Then I took yet another page from Frank McCourt and began to drink, which made me feel much better. Wish I’d thought of it sooner.

But I’m not beaten yet. My NEW idea is for each family member to hide their towels in an undisclosed location to keep them from being pilfered. This seems to be working, though I did not intend to create so much fear and distrust, especially around the holidays.

If this final effort fails, I will buy a case of Vodka. If I can’t win, I might as well not care.
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