Have you ever opened up your washer and seen dozens of foreign objects floating around, along with hundreds of ¼” pieces of cardboard??? It’s an odd feeling – you’ll have to try it sometime.
I had been working on the yard too long and wasn’t exactly paying proper attention to what I was doing. Imagine my surprise when I saw all those wonderful Hefty, 13-gallon trash bags that had expanded with various amounts of water filling them – 45 – to be exact – and covered with bits of their cardboard box enclosure – or rather, what used to be their enclosure.
What would you do? I did what any intelligent person would do – I closed the lid and left the room. I was thinking – well, you don’t want to know what I was thinking, except that I was glad Bob wasn’t home. Gathering my courage, I re-entered the scene of the slime and bravely opened the lid again. Much to my dismay they hadn’t disappeared; I wasn’t seeing things – they were still in there looking up at me with a sneer on each of their “unscented odor blocked Gripper faces.
Piecing together (pun intended) what had happened, I realized that I had knocked off my brand-new box of garbage bags that I had set of top of the dryer temporarily – very temporarily, as it turned out – into the washer. A washer, doing what it was supposed to do, washed them.
So, things are tough, right? Who wants to waste a whole box of brand spanking new, pristine, virgin garbage bags, yet untouched by garbage? Not me. If I’m crazy enough to wash them, then I’d better pick off all those little ¼” pieces of cardboard and dry the bags inside and out.
After closing the washer lid and going back to look again any number of times, I decided my best mode of operandi was to do – nothing – at the moment. I chose not to share my adventure with my darling husband. If the incident had clogged the drain, I might have learned a few words I hadn’t heard in my 54 years of marriage.
The following day I tried picking the cardboard off, dumping the water out of each bag and soundly soaking myself a bazillion times. The dogs carefully slinked off into their respective corners. After all, where there is water, there could be a bath, and they definitely didn’t want that.
.By the time the laundry room floor and I were properly soaked I discovered about half the roll still intact in the bottom of the washer. I decided I wasn’t nearly as poor as I thought and determined that any self-respecting woman would load up all those miserable trash bags into one and deposit the whole sorry mess into the trash barrel – down deep where the evidence would require no admitting to stupidity.
Now my idea of down deep in the trash barrel wasn’t deep enough. When Bob went to add something to the barrel, he saw this odd bag peeking out at him from the depths of guilt and decided to check it out. It didn’t take long to decipher what had happened, and he tactlessly mentioned it to me. While trying to hide a grin, he said would put a sign out front that read, “Will wash trash bags for free” Some husbands just have to get in the last word.

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