A Laundry Tale

Once upon a time, there was a nice little family and they lived in a nice little yellow house.  What was not nice was the laundry.  The woman of the house did not like to do the laundry.  She had to go down the rickety wooden stairs into the cold basement in order to wash the clothes.  She thought she would rather stay upstairs where it was warm, and do the washing and drying another day.  Every day she thought this, "I will do it tomorrow."  Oh, certainly, she would occasionally go down and wash a load when they really needed clothes, but most other times she would put it off.  Now what the woman did not realize, or perhaps didn't want to realize, was that the laundry pile was growing.  It was growing and growing, almost like a living thing. 

Eventually, her husband came to notice this growing beast within his basement.  And the man said to his wife, "Let us take all of the clothes to the laundrymat and get them all done at once."  And his wife agreed.  They sent their oldest son to his grandparents, and would have sent the younger two as well, but circumstances were against them doing so, and so they took them along.

Though the laundrymat was large and the machines were many, it still took much time to load them all up, and wash and dry it all.  From the time they began gathering the clothes to take to the laundrymat, to the time that everything was dried or drying, it was three and a half hours.  At first the children were happy and played and frolicked among the laundry carts, but as time passed, they grew tired and hungry and they no longer wanted to be at this strange place filled with loud machines and people and clothing.  Finally, the man said to his wife, "I will take you and the children home, and I will come back for the rest of the clothes."  And the woman agreed, for she was very tired. 

So they took the children home and put them in their beds, and the woman stayed behind while the man went back to get the rest of the clothes that had not yet dried.  The woman thought she might sigh with relief, but alas, it was not over yet!  There was still the folding and putting away.  And she knew she would not be able to get the folding all done tonight, nay, not even half of it, without staying up to the wee hours.  She wished with all her might that a fairy would come and do all the folding and putting away for her so she would not have to do it the next day.  And behold! nothing happened, because fairies are not real, and in real life you must do all the work yourself and without magic.

And the moral of the story is, you can only put off unpleasant things for so long before you must face them, and when you finally do, they will inevitably be far more unpleasant than they would have been originally.