"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
Confucius was a big thinker and the idea that beauty is everywhere is a nice, fluffy thought.
I appreciate a wide variety of beauty in the world, but there are a few things I didn't think I'd ever describe as beautiful. A clogged toilet. Soap scum. A dead skunk in the middle of the road. My hair in the morning. Laundry.
A person doesn't ordinarily expect to encounter beauty when doing the laundry. Especially dirty laundry. Clean, freshly laundered clothes - I might be able to perceive a load of loveliness in that. Particularly if they are folded. And put away. Neatly. But I suppose laundry that is folded and put away is no longer laundry, is it?
I wonder what Confucius would say about that?
Anyway, I like to believe I'm pretty good at seeing beauty in various places, I just hadn't considered looking for it in the laundry room. Until I had my dryer repaired. This involved taking the machine apart. I can't say that I saw beauty in the dismantled dryer parts, or that I expected any, which is why the lint balls came as such a surprise.
First a primer on dryer anatomy. Inside most clothes dryers sits a tubular cavity called a drum. The drum has hollow walls and rotates as air blows in to tumble and dry the washed clothes. Throughout the life of a dryer its drum rotates thousands and thousands of times.
Every so often, a teeny snippet of lint sneaks its way into the empty crevice between the drum walls. The lint is trapped, turning around and around with each spin of the drum. Eventually it is joined by another piece of lint. The two tumble randomly until they cross paths, at which time they adhere to what I call dust bunny physics. Static electricity and friction cause the individual pieces to come together and become one piece of lint.
And so it goes in the dryer. A speck of lint joins another, and another, and another. The rotation of the drum forms the lint into a perfect ball, working much like a rock tumbler polishing rocks, except here we're talking polished lint. Who knew that even existed?
It's a gradual process that can take years and you'll never know it's happening unless you remove your drum and peek inside.
Which is just what my dryer repair professional did and how we found the flawlessly formed, smooth and sleek little gray lint balls. The biggest measured less than two inches in diameter, but it probably took years to create. Makes a person view lint through a whole new looking glass.
My first instinct was to toss them in the garbage. It's what you do with lint. But these little balls had elevated themselves beyond the status of dryer debris. They were unique, perfect orbs and came as a complete surprise. They embodied beauty in a way I'd never contemplated it before. So there I stood, in my mundane laundry room, having a eureka life moment. Expect the unexpected.
Every so often, life throws you a curve ball. Today, it threw me a lint ball, and altered my expectations about beauty - of all things.
- Jill Pertler's column appears every Thursday in the Times. She can be reached at pertmn@qwest.net.
Confucius was a big thinker and the idea that beauty is everywhere is a nice, fluffy thought.
I appreciate a wide variety of beauty in the world, but there are a few things I didn't think I'd ever describe as beautiful. A clogged toilet. Soap scum. A dead skunk in the middle of the road. My hair in the morning. Laundry.
A person doesn't ordinarily expect to encounter beauty when doing the laundry. Especially dirty laundry. Clean, freshly laundered clothes - I might be able to perceive a load of loveliness in that. Particularly if they are folded. And put away. Neatly. But I suppose laundry that is folded and put away is no longer laundry, is it?
I wonder what Confucius would say about that?
Anyway, I like to believe I'm pretty good at seeing beauty in various places, I just hadn't considered looking for it in the laundry room. Until I had my dryer repaired. This involved taking the machine apart. I can't say that I saw beauty in the dismantled dryer parts, or that I expected any, which is why the lint balls came as such a surprise.
First a primer on dryer anatomy. Inside most clothes dryers sits a tubular cavity called a drum. The drum has hollow walls and rotates as air blows in to tumble and dry the washed clothes. Throughout the life of a dryer its drum rotates thousands and thousands of times.
Every so often, a teeny snippet of lint sneaks its way into the empty crevice between the drum walls. The lint is trapped, turning around and around with each spin of the drum. Eventually it is joined by another piece of lint. The two tumble randomly until they cross paths, at which time they adhere to what I call dust bunny physics. Static electricity and friction cause the individual pieces to come together and become one piece of lint.
And so it goes in the dryer. A speck of lint joins another, and another, and another. The rotation of the drum forms the lint into a perfect ball, working much like a rock tumbler polishing rocks, except here we're talking polished lint. Who knew that even existed?
It's a gradual process that can take years and you'll never know it's happening unless you remove your drum and peek inside.
Which is just what my dryer repair professional did and how we found the flawlessly formed, smooth and sleek little gray lint balls. The biggest measured less than two inches in diameter, but it probably took years to create. Makes a person view lint through a whole new looking glass.
My first instinct was to toss them in the garbage. It's what you do with lint. But these little balls had elevated themselves beyond the status of dryer debris. They were unique, perfect orbs and came as a complete surprise. They embodied beauty in a way I'd never contemplated it before. So there I stood, in my mundane laundry room, having a eureka life moment. Expect the unexpected.
Every so often, life throws you a curve ball. Today, it threw me a lint ball, and altered my expectations about beauty - of all things.
- Jill Pertler's column appears every Thursday in the Times. She can be reached at pertmn@qwest.net.
