My Laundry Disaster

I thought I’d share a fun story about me in High School.

I had only been 16 maybe a couple of weeks when I went on a trip to Nicaragua with Bridges to Community. This was shortly after Hurricane Mitch hit and half the town we went to had been wiped out by a mudslide. This was my first time out of the country and this was really an attempt by my mom to broaden my horizons, have a good experience doing some charity work, and probably to also give me some college essay material.

While I was there in this town with no paved roads, me: white, pasty, and partially sunburned, I was checking out the local market and I saw this awesome braided garlic they were selling.   This was the kind of thing you see in movies where they are hanging up the garlic braids to keep the vampires away.

Just as an aside note here – I LOVED vampires. This was a long time ago before vampires became trendy. I was very precocious…. and gothy. I knew they were selling it for cooking and not for any supernatural purpose, but I couldn’t help but run my imagination over the movie-prop capabilities I could have with this garlic.

SO of course I was going to have to buy this garlic and decorate my room with it, and then if anyone asked me why I had garlic hanging there, I could tell them it was to keep the vampires away and my vampire-loving friends would think I was cool and my non-vampire-loving friends would be creeped out, and I could make a movie with my friends about vampires and have this awesome garlic prop.  I could even utilize it in a Halloween costume. Oh the possibilities! That was the plan anyway.

So I bought this braided garlic for a nickel  (what a bargain!)  and brought it back to my tent (we were staying in tents, we were there to build houses as there was a distinct lack of infrastructure, running water, and walled buildings in this poor rural community). The time came to leave and I didn’t want customs to find my garlic when I came back into the US. I had visions of myself getting arrested and detained and all kinds of horrible things and  didn’t think it would go over well if I tried to explain my love of vampires to the customs agents, and how I would never be able to find awesome garlic in braids in the US  for a nickel… so I hit the garlic in a pair of pants in my suitcase.

Notwithstanding, I traveled home and got through customs without incident. By the time I got home I had forgotten all about the garlic, but my suitcase smelled SO bad. I was too embarassed to have my mom do my laundry, so I was going to be a good responsible adult and do my own laundry (as I often did as a teenager).  I dumped everything in the laundry machine and turned it on hot. I came back before the machine was done only to find that the laundry room had a funk to it. Opening the lid of the machine there was this godawful smell of *something * that watered my eyes.  Puzzled (and scared that mom was going to get mad at me for breaking the washing machine with my smelly Nicaragua clothes), I was trying to take my clothes out of the machine one by one to put them in the dryer (because THAT was going to help!) when I noticed all the pieces of garlic EVERYWHERE.  Garlic floating in the water, garlic clogging up the drain holes, garlic in every nook and cranny of every clothing item. That’s when I remembered I had put the garlic in my pants, except now I had essentially cooked all my clothes in a hot garlic and detergent bath. I think I had tried to clean it up before mom came into the laundry room, but the smell was hard to ignore.

My memory of this incident kind of ends there. I know my mom was kind and understanding, but didn’t help me at all in cleaning out the machine.  I remember picking out lots of papery garlic bits from the lint catcher, and I remember that after a couple of washes everything was mostly better, and the smell  did go away eventually.

Have you ever had a laundry disaster where something got accidentally washed? Please share!