What does it mean to fold a dryer’s full of clothes? That might seem like a question of no import. But if you ponder it, I suspect your mind will eventually wander back to someone in your family.

Humans usually don’t figure out how to fold clothes on our own. Someone shows us how. Someone shows us how to bisect a pair of pants, smooth the legs together, then turn the entire affair into a zigzag. Eventually, you have a compact rectangle of slack or jean or chino.

Little things

What about a towel? How many times do we turn it over and across? How small do we make that resulting square? Your mother or father or grandmother likely had strong opinions on the subject, perhaps linked to cupboard size.

The most challenging items to fold are, of course, shirts. No method of folding shirts makes sense. I learned to fold the shirt vetically and reach both of the arms out as though the wearer was serving a volleyball. (Sometimes the arms naturally reach backward, as though the wearer was being arrested.) Then I folded the arms back toward the shirt and bisect the entire thing.

If you think that description’s confusing, try folding some shirts!

We don’t really have a vocabulary for a practice so basic and ingrained. We learn how to fold them, then we do it for the rest of our lives. Perhaps we squabble over who tackles the next batch. But we don’t focus on the folding itself. The knowledge stays locked inside us like the half-remembered melody of a song, activated when we hear the tune or pick up the rainbow sweater vest.

Clothes don’t have to be folded. You can always put them on a hangers. No item of clothing works better on a hanger than a long-sleeved shirt. A coat comes in a close second because there’s really no other place to put it except a hook, and that stretches out the back of its collar.

You can also leave them in a pile on the floor. This method, while supremely efficient and easy to understand, has faced rejection from mothers in law and neatness-obsessed roommates the world over. I’m not sure what their problem is.

For a brief time, I dry cleaned my clothes. When I moved back to Kansas to work at The Topeka Capital-Journal, I decided that I was going to wear suits every day to work. I like this as a concept: the suit works marvelously as a uniform suggesting formality and elegance. I don’t know that it worked, but I like to imagine that it did.

The suits had to be maintained, however, which meant regular trips to the dry cleaner a few blocks from my home. (Post pandemic, that branch of the cleaner has closed.) I loved the concept of outsourcing the entire operation — cleaning, folding and hanging.

The suits didn’t last. We were raising a kindergartner at the time, and the house was usually turned upside down for one reason or another. Career changes came soon after. I blinked a couple of times and there I was in the laundry room again, taking out a fresh batch of warm clothes and folding them one by one.

There are, I suppose, worse ways to spend a weekend afternoon. And I can always go back to the suits.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor.