Homework

When I first got married both my Wife and I were in college, she at BYU and I at UVU. We lived in a basement apartment below right off of the freeway overpass. We found the place on the wall at the Wilkinson Center on BYU campus right before we got married. The rent was three hundred twenty five dollars a month. I think combined income for us at the time was under one thousand a month. Maggie was working at the library on campus and I was starting as a Spanish teacher at the missionary training center. We moved most of our stuff into the apartment a week before the wedding. My Dad was helping us and while we were there he asked us what we were going to sleep on? I had not thought about it. Mom and Dad had always provided things like dressers and beds and everything else I had ever needed. I had lived in Paraguay for two years as a missionary, but again the beds and dressers and things were all provided. Dad took us to the local furniture store and we got probably the cheapest mattress and box springs they had. Luckily the frame came with it. We tied it to the top of my Dad's van and set it up only to realize that we probably would need sheets and blankets too. We picked those up a few days later. We got married and moved in two weeks later. I started school a week before my Wife. Homework was always easy to get done because I would just go to the library where my Wife worked and do it there. She usually worked the evening shift so I would come home make dinner and bring it to her at work. We had access to the staff lounge to eat even though she was just a student. I made some pretty great meals; macaroni and cheese, salad with dressing, tuna fish sandwiches, and sometimes I would do harder things like chicken and rice or spaghetti. On Saturdays we would walk down to the corner laundry mat and do our laundry. We didn't have a TV so we didn't just sit and watch anything together except the washers and dryers at the laundry mat. The doors were all glass and opened front ways. We would put our whites in one and darks in one right next to it. Put the soap in and shut the door. Once that was all set we put four quarters into the machine all lined up and pushed them into the machine. The machines would then turn on and start to spin. Now at the laundry mat we brought our homework while we waited but I was always distracted by the machines and their spinning. The machines would fill up with water and then slosh the cloths about, agitating the water and getting the soap all sudsy. Once this cycle was completed the machine would proceed to rinse and spin. I think there were three rinse and spin cycles each time the spin cycle stopped the machine would make a loud hissing noise as the brake engages to stop the spinning. Homework forgotten we would get a cart and take out all of the wet cloths and move to the dryers. This also meant changing seats. The seats in the laundry mat were plastic molded chairs screwed to a metal frame. The chairs were bright yellow or blue or red or green. Some of the chairs were cracked or broken but that really didn't make much of a difference. The chairs faced the washers and the dryers in neat little rows. We were never alone in the laundry mat. Their was always someone else there sometimes with little kids running around as well. Once we switched the laundry to the dryers we had to check the lint trap, clean it out and put more quarters into the machines. This time the machine had a counter that lit up every time a coin was put into the machine a quarter gave you fifteen minutes and so we usually put in four quarters and started the machines again. Again we would sit with the intent on doing homework but I would be distracted again by the spinning of the dryer. If a shirt had buttons it would make a clicking sound. If the cloths were light they would stay in the air longer than the rest as they went to the top and fell back down. Sometimes all of the cloths would get bunched up and roll together and other times they seemed to not want to be in contact with anything else. When the laundry was done we would fold it up and take it back home. I had a blue mesh laundry bag that said "just do it" on the front that we used to carry all of the laundry. I still had more homework to do.