4.30.2025

There's another launderer I recognize. Younger, taller, rows of braids tight to her skull. I remember her from last time. I remember her because she came over to where I was sitting and helped herself to a couple of dryer sheets from a box I had in front of me. She didn't ask, just a quick gesture to indicate she was taking them. I was fine with that. Liked it, even, but it was confusing.

All these possibilities branched out from that one small action: she wasn't rude about it so I didn't take it personally, but the worst case scenario was that she could tell I was an American and therefore not entitled to parade my personal possessions around these parts without consequence. Tariffs and all that.

Another was that in this particular laundromat, such items are considered communal property. Maybe the owners put out detergent and fabric softener and such for everyone to use, but I've seen no evidence of that. So the convention was already established - which means, it looked like I was hoarding public resources and she saw no reason to ask my permission.

On a larger and more abstract scale, I want to believe that such a thing derives from a communistic attitude in general among the Quebecois. My house is your house. My dryer sheets are your dryer sheets. I like this one best because it's a concrete example of an innate sense of community I've been observing and trying to articulate since I got here. Also it suggests she just thought of me as a member of the tribe. One of the cool kids. Cool kids share laundry resources. Naturally.

The version I choose to believe is this: the young woman is a scholar of sociology at McGill. Her thesis entails spending portions of a grant to engage in ethnographic research in public spaces on the island of Montreal. It's her routine to go to several laundromats a week and test launderers' boundaries. She's gotten into some pretty gnarly scrapes, taking wet clothes out of dryers and putting them in other dryers, mixing customers' loads together, throwing black socks in with whites, jamming up the change machine with non-Canadian currency. She does all of this under the auspices of 'research' but in fact she's a Moroccan trickster goddess. Once, during a solar eclipse, she crept in while everyone was outside watching the event and removed all the clothes from all the machines and scattered them across the tiles, still wet. Then when the sunlight returned she recorded the customers' reactions from a cafe across the street. So I got off easy.