Like freaking magic
So, a week ago, there was this incident. There were these pants and in these pants were these crayons and these pants containing these crayons went into the washer and then into the dryer and the wax from the crayons melted and blobbed around and got all over everything, and, like, DAMN, those were my favorite clothes!
Despair set in. During a whole week of wearing my third-best pair of jeans and a bunch of shirts I usually only wear when the best ones are dirty, I’d come home and see this basket of ruined clothes and want to run away, far far away to some tropical land where you can dance naked on the beach and clothes don’t matter, and more importantly, where everybody is slightly round in the middle and extremely pale and I wouldn’t be out of place.
Then I received the laundry tip of the year, from the Internet via Deborah of my writer’s group.
It’s all about the Borax, folks. The "20-Mule Team" Borax. I was familiar with this stuff from washing Jimmy’s cloth diapers. The stuff is potent. It’ll take what was a really bad poop stain on a cloth diaper and make it into a less-noticeable poop stain. But would it take out crayon?
Yes. I had to pretreat the clothes with Oxi-Clean, I had to soak them in hot water and Borax for a half hour, I had to scrub them, I had to wash them once, I had to soak them again, I had to scrub them some more, and I had to wash them a second time, but in the end, the crayon mostly came out. If you, for some reason, were on your hands and knees inspecting my jeans from six inches or so away, you might notice a couple of faint blotches of color, but you otherwise wouldn’t know anything had happened. Other garments came out even better. Only two were damaged beyond salvation.
Aaaah. Nothing like a good resolution to an annoying problem to put a little spring in your step.
Plus, there’s a real sense of satisfaction about calling in the help of a team of mules. There’s something so pioneer about it. If only a team of mules could solve all our problems.
Mules are my new favorite animals.
