Sunday Afternoon, Folding a Pile of Sun-Dried Laundry

Four in the afternoon, Sunday. The pile of clothes I had just brought in from the yard was still warm from the sun, sitting on the sofa as high as half the backrest. For twenty years there has been a pile like it in our house every Sunday afternoon.

I fold fast, so fast my hands finish before my head knows. The phone leans against the water bottle on the table, a drama series running, and I fold as it plays. One episode ends, one pile ends. Not once have I remembered which shirt I folded first that day, and I never remember the episode I just watched.

This is not about who in the house should do the chores, and it is not telling you to fold neatly. I am not trying to turn a household task into an exercise. I am only telling you about one afternoon when my phone ran out of battery, and what my hands found in that very familiar pile.

An afternoon with no show

That day I had forgotten to plug it in the night before. By the time I carried the pile in from the yard, the phone screen was dark, with only a faint reflection of me in it. I plugged it in, in the bedroom, and told myself fine, I will fold first and watch later.

The house was quiet. There was the steady turn of the ceiling fan and, farther away, out in the alley, the call of a hot-bread seller stretching out and fading.

The bath towel was the first thing I picked up. It was stiffer than usual from the sun, and heavier than I expected. I held it against my cheek for a while, without knowing why. It smelled of sun, of dryness, of a day that had gone by without my noticing it go.

Tuấn's white shirt had a small fray at the cuff, the kind of mark you only see when it is in your hands. Khang's blue T-shirt was different. He left it behind when he went to the dorm, and I have gone on washing it with the rest out of habit. I stopped at that shirt. Not very sad, not happy either. Just that holding it, I saw it was smaller than I remembered.

"What are you folding that takes so long?" Tuấn asked, looking in from the doorway.

"Folding."

"Usually twenty minutes and you're done."

"Today it's longer. Sit down and fold the socks."

He sat down. He folds socks his own way, tucking one into the other, and I did not correct him.

The easy explanation for stopping at the blue shirt is that I miss my son. Maybe partly true. But I think there is a smaller thing: I had never looked at it. Twenty years of holding thousands of shirts, and all I knew was which shirt went in which drawer. My hands knew everything, and my eyes had never been invited in.

A show playing while I fold is not a bad thing. It makes housework less dull. It is only that it takes away exactly the stretch where my hands have a familiar job, which for me should be the easiest time to stay in it.

Where I almost quit

The following week I tried again and felt bored. Truly bored, the kind where three shirts in I already wanted to switch the phone on. The pile, half the height of the backrest, suddenly felt as long as a working day.

I made two mistakes the second time.

The first was that I demanded the same kind of moment every time. The first time there was a sunny towel, a shirt of my son's, the hot-bread seller. The second time there was nothing: just Tuấn's T-shirts and a few kitchen cloths. I sat waiting for a feeling to appear, and it did not come. Waiting like that only made the pile longer. What I let go of was the demand that it be moving. That day I only looked at a kitchen cloth, saw a loose thread at one corner, and that was enough to keep folding.

The second was that I forced myself to fold slowly. Slowly meaning thirty seconds a shirt. I counted. And once I counted, I was thinking about the number, not the shirt. I dropped the counting and kept just one thing: fold about one beat slower than usual, enough to see what I am holding.

There was also one afternoon I tried, then went back to the show. Two episodes in a row. That was fine. The next afternoon I turned the show off, and the pile was still there.

The Sunday afternoons after that

I do not fold with nothing else on every week now. Some afternoons there is a show, some afternoons a radio, some afternoons Tuấn sits beside me folding socks and talking about nothing in particular. But one thing changed that I never set out to change: before I fold the first item, I often look at it for a beat.

Just a beat. That look does not make me any calmer, and I do not think it is supposed to. It only makes folding something I am doing, instead of something that happens while I am somewhere else.

This small idea belongs to the same family as finding peace in the simplest tasks, where someone else finds it in washing dishes or sweeping. And if you are the kind of person who needs to practise one thing at a time, the art of slow living speaks to that more broadly. Or if you like having a scene to begin from, this morning I washed the dishes without thinking of anything else is one such scene, at the sink instead of on the sofa.

If you try it a few afternoons and find nothing, that is simply how it is. For some people folding is when the head rests most, and nothing needs adding. Some need a show, music, or voices to get the hands working. Not every chore is a place to stay in. All worth keeping is this: if you want to look at one shirt, there was one afternoon when you were allowed to.

Some day, if you see a pile of clothes still warm from the sun sitting on a chair, try sitting down beside it for a while.

The first towel you pick up will be heavier than you think.