The laundry is a mire. It's knee-deep if it's an inch: a twisted miasma of quasi-liquid fabric stew running from wall to wall. Clean laundry is loaded in a robust log atop the washer and drier, oozing over their faces.

There are laundry baskets in there somewhere, too -- you can tell because they raise hummocks in the kipple. Sometimes I bump into them as I wade.

The yield is low. When one stoops to haul wet laundry out of the front-loading washer and shovels it hand over hand into the front-loading drier, a certain amount of spillage mixes with the swamp. This spillage is lost, because it is very difficult to differentiate freshly sodden clothing from the merely very cold clothing already on the floor. The laundry room, you see, lacks adequate heating.

This swamp of wardrobe is not confined to the frozen laundry room, however. Instead, it continues in an unpredictable arrangement of tentacles ranging throughout the rest of the house. The greatness of man is evident in his ability to acclimate to any horror, and so it has come to pass that I now can be counted on to become quite irate if I go looking for a pair of children's pajamas hanging from the piano only be left in the lurch.

"I thought we had a system here!"

But we don't. There are fleeting appearences of sensible-like systems, but these are just brief fits of spontaneous organization like the eddies in a current of water -- achievements on the order of magnitude of God's cheapest chicks but entirely unsuitable for keeping the laundry tidy.

So I keep shovelling. I use my foot to press in the lack wad of pink panties so I can wrestle closed the door of our gay European low-energy washer, then fight my way through the log of clean stuff to blindly grope for the controls. I twist a dial, and wait, poised to hear the tell-tale grumble of the machine's slow wind-up to its multi-hour, pendulum-powered, environmentally-compliant application of its semi-effectual service.

Somewhere, water trickles. I reckon something's happening so I machete my way out again, stumbling gasping for the comparatively open air and clear light of the bathroom. The washer groans ominously and then begins to lethargically slosh the clothes back and forth like the world's laziest, sleepiest juggler.

Take that, Global Warming!

I wipe the perspiration from my brow. Slogging through the swamp is hard. My hands smell like Tide. I rotate my shoulder, loosening my shovelling arm. Another tough shift in the fabric mines. Hippies should compose folksy working songs about my laundry. I'd pay them in lint.

The worst part is that I came away from the ordeal without any clean socks. But I can still dream.