I thoroughly enjoy the Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series featuring Precious Ramotswe. In one of the more recent titles, Precious and Grace accepted as fact that men throw their laundry on the floor. The two detectives considered this clothing-as-debris behavior as unchangeable. This made me wonder how things might have been different had Precious and Grace reacted differently when, at the beginning of their marriages, they encountered the clothes on the floor.
That, in turn, prompted me to dash off this poem.
There They Lie
Dirty underwear,
jeans, tees, and shirts litter
the floor,
crumpled where you
dropped them under
the mistaken notion that
somebody would pick them up
and return them freshly laundered
the way your mother used to
. . . or maybe your father,
while ineffectually admonishing you
to pick them up
yourself.
Yourself now acts as if
I will pick up discarded raiments
and return them laundered. Yourself
is in for a scrubbing in thick suds
of intransigence. I not only refuse
to stoop for your dirty laundry,
I treat it like floor covering,
making certain to wipe
my feet
on it.
________________
You can read other poems by Barbara Gregorich in Crossing the Skyway: Poems.
Try them all. You will not be disappointed.
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I haven’t read any of the other series A.M. Smith writes. I think there are two others.
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Barbara, a good poem and apparently you chose to walk on the “macabre” side of dirty laundry (smile)! Coincidentally, I too just finished reading “The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine.” Love those books and I’ve just picked up another at the library for 50 cents. However, it’s another of Alexander McCall Smith’s characters, one I’m not familiar with, Isabel Dalhousie. Haven’t got very far, but the character is developing very nicely. Interestingly enough, she’s a student of philosophy and spouts aphorisms or maxims quite a bit! (right up my alley)
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