Yesterday was day nine without electricity in our home. Only four houses on our street remain unplugged. All the other neighbors had their power restored the Sunday after the storm. As I have mentioned in previous posts and comments, although not having our own electricity is proving to be very cumbersome, we have until now managed to stay in our home with the help of our neighbors by borrowing electricity to run a few appliances and getting hot water for tea and coffee as needed. Yesterday I did a load of laundry in a friend's house. So there is no pile of dirty clothes in my utility room waiting for the washer & dryer to come back to life.
Not everyone in Houston has the good fortune to share the amenities of their neighbors' homes because there are still several neighborhoods where all the houses are in the dark. The situation with the power supply has been an entirely random affair - wealthy and poor neighborhoods have been equally affected. There are less affluent areas who have had their electricity restored and some of the ritziest addresses in Houston are languishing in the heat and the dark. Given the right climatic conditions, the rich and the poor get equally sweaty and designer clothes need washing just as much as a faded t-shirt. As a result, Houstonians from widely different social backgrounds are bumping into each other for brief but amicable interludes in the area laundromats, which in Houston, mostly go by the name of "washeterias."
Wet clothes, warm hearts
The lady who drives a new Lexus didn't know laundromat etiquette, but she had to act quickly when she found a pair of pink underpants in a washer she wanted to use.
Admittedly grossed out by touching a stranger's lacy undies, Adrienne Brown-Franklin snatched them between her thumb and index finger, and flung them into a cart of wet clothes being pushed away by the woman who had just used the machine.
They landed perfectly, without even drawing notice.
"Who am I to be sitting in here saying this is horrible," said Brown-Franklin, a stay-at-home mom who found an open laundromat in Montrose Friday.
A week after Hurricane Ike hit, Houstonians from all walks of life are becoming laundry refugees as clothes are getting stinky.
They are forced to search out often-crowded laundromats, where they get to know each other in tight quarters and tough times.
"Rich and poor, Spanish and English, we're all together and nobody is fighting," Rosa Amet, an immigrant from Latin America said in Spanish. "It is great."
With more than 1 million people living without power, the latest necessity is finding fresh clothes to sweat in.
Droves of people accustomed to their own washer and dryer are driving around, searching for laundromats. Parking lots were packed, and the wait for machines so long one woman called it the new gas line.
Alma Vazquez, who has been an attendant at the washateria near the corner of Alabama and Shepherd for nearly a year, said she's never seen so many customers at once.
"It is packed. It has been crazy," she said, noting that the overwhelming majority of them seemed to be first-timers.
They had issues with everything from figuring out how much money to put in machines to how much soap.
Mark Pinón, a Houston visual artist, said he was impressed that so many different people from different backgrounds got along so well.
"It is a cross-section of the city," he said as he finished up his load of clothing. "There was no washateria rage."
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