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Today’s trip to the laundromat is not part of my Lenten journey. I’m here because my dryer is broken, and the repair will take a week. So here I am in a laundromat advertised as the cleanest in town. It smells like fast food and could use a fresh paint job and a disinfecting mop.
An older woman, her lips wrapped around a toothless smile, kindly beckons me to the dryer where she’s just finished a load. “It’s still warm,” she says. Another woman in a fluorescent yellow safety vest – crossing guard? construction worker? – helps me figure out how many quarters I need for the washing machine. A third woman is curled up in a chair by the window, dozing in a patch of warm sun. She is so thin and frail that her shoulder blades poke through the back of her shirt like a pair of tiny angel wings.
I wonder if these women come to the laundromat regularly, if we’d get to know one another if we kept meeting here.
This place isn’t pretty, and the chair I’m writing in is not comfortable. But the rhythmic sound of the machines is soothing, and I appreciate this laundromat as a place where people can get clean. You roll in with a basket of dirty clothes, and you leave with a transformed pile: clean, warm and neatly folded. In a way, it feels like church. We are welcomed with all our mess, cleansed through the ritual of confession and restored through God’s forgiveness – leaving transformed, renewed, like our own life is clean, warm and neatly folded.
As I sit and write among my new laundromat friends, I wish this for us all. May God grace us with his cleansing today.
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