I have always been kind of a neat freak even when I could barely walk. I remember having one of those toy vacuums and going all around the house with it picking up things and organizing my other toys. I loved to play house. My mother thought it was cute and she still does, but it’s more like she’s grateful she has her own personal maid.

I really don’t mind.

This reason is why I spend my time before Mrs. Cunningham is scheduled to come over cleaning dishes and doing laundry.

After the dishes and silverware are clean and drying on the dish rack, I gather up all our dirty laundry. Mine are already together in the hamper but I find my mom’s lying all over the place. Even find some silky panties hanging from her ceiling fan. Disgusting to say the least, but what I won’t do for her.

Clothes piled into a decent mound in the rectangular white laundry basket, I head out of the apartment with it resting against my hip. The hallway is silent other than the loud sound of a British soccer game going on from Mr. Murphy’s apartment. He’s a middle-aged man who works in construction with a very thick mustache and a big bald patch. Mr. Murphy is always going on about the motherland and how much better it is and so on. He is kind of funny though. He always makes me laugh even if he is trying to be serious. I think it might be his thick accent.

When I pass his apartment door, I hear him shouting expletives and slang. He talks about football a lot or footie as he calls it. He’s tried and failed many times to explain it to me but soccer and many other sports escape me. Yeah, I know I am a sad excuse for a young growing boy, at least according to Mr. Murphy.

One uneventful elevator ride later, I find myself in the laundry room downstairs on the lobby floor.

The room isn’t too big but large enough to hold about six washer and dryers each. The walls are an awful pea soup green that’s molded and chipped in some spots. The tile floors are scuffed and chipped with a suspicious looking brownish crimson stain in one corner beside the faulty washer. There is a poorly stocked vending machine, a few chairs, and a change machine that I’ve had to kick a time or two so it would give me my quarters.

There is a large woman leaving with a sack of clean laundry as I enter. We smile faintly at each other, a sort of awkward grin between two strangers. I’ve seen her but she definitely isn’t on my floor. I don’t know everyone in my building except those on my floor and a few others.

I move to one washer, the one I often use. Isn’t it kind of funny how people naturally go with what they are comfortable with? Like sitting on the same seat on the bus or always taking the same route to the dollar theater on 5th. I always automatically go to this washer and then the same dryer unless it’s already in use. If it is I always feel strange. Maybe I’m just weird and totally OCD or other people do the same thing, but I can’t help but think about the overlooked or the little things sometimes.