A letter from a reader

At 64, I owned a laundry basket I would have been embarrassed to lend anyone

The longest thing I have written since I retired is the list on the fridge of who is bringing what at Christmas, so this is a stretch for me. I am not a writer, and in sixty-four years I have never once thought it was my business to tell another woman what to keep in her house.

But three different women asked me about my laundry baskets on Saturday, standing on the front path of my sister-in-law’s new villa at Mittagong, and I have explained it so many times since that it seemed easier to write it all down once.

It started three weeks earlier. Graham’s sister Lyn is 71, and after forty years she had sold the family house and bought a little two-bedroom villa down in the Southern Highlands. I went up to help her sort. I found her in the garage with a roll of bin bags and a cup of tea going cold on the freezer, and she told me her rule for what was allowed to come.

If I would not be happy for the neighbours to see it, it is not coming.

Out went the chipped casserole dishes, a bath mat older than the grandkids, a fondue set nobody had touched since it was a wedding present. I laughed at her all afternoon. Then I drove home, went into my own laundry, and looked at my basket. Cracked plastic, gone chalky from thirty summers on the back step, with one handle held together by Graham’s black electrical tape. It would not have made it out of Lyn’s garage.

I did not choose that basket. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody stands in a shop and decides she would like to carry her washing round in something she would hide from visitors. It just turns up, cheap and grey, and then it stays for thirty years because a laundry basket never seems worth the thought.

How it happens

Go and look the next time you are at the big shopping centre. The laundry baskets are always down the back, next to the mop buckets, as if nobody will ever see one.

And the choice they leave you is a poor one. There is the plastic tub that cracks at the handles and goes chalky in the sun. There is the wicker one that snags every tea towel you put in it. And there are the fabric bags that slump into a puddle the minute they are empty.

Practical, or pretty. Never both. So you buy the practical one, and you stop looking at it.

What I had wrong

I thought a nice laundry basket would be a precious thing. Something for show, that you would be nervous to put wet towels in or carry up and down the hall.

That was backwards. A good basket is one you are not precious about at all. It stands up on its own, it takes the washing, it wipes clean, and it happens to be lovely while it does it.

The lovely part is not the luxury. It is just the bit the shops forgot to bother with.

The one I bought first is the Honey

It is from Thompson Sydney, a little Australian boutique that has been quietly making the home a bit lovelier for a few years now.

The Honey is a quilted basket in warm honey gold, with the quilting done in little honeycomb shapes round the top, and below that a soft taupe meadow with white daisies all the way round the bottom. Across the middle of the front sits one big round bumblebee, which is the bit everybody points at. It has a wide cream cuff folded over the top and two soft loop handles you can actually get your hand through.

It stands up on its own, even empty, so it does not sag into the corner of the laundry. The picture goes all the way round, so there is no ugly back to turn to the wall. The handles are stitched on properly for carrying a full load from the machine to the line. It wipes clean if the grandkids put something muddy in it, it can be washed when it needs it, and on the rare day you do not want it out, it folds down flat.

They come in a small, a medium and a large. I have the medium, which takes a full load of towels with room to spare.

What happened on moving day

Lyn moved last Saturday. Graham drove us down the Hume with the boot full, and because I had volunteered for the linen, I packed Lyn’s sheets and towels into my two new baskets instead of yet another cardboard box.

I had them on the path for less than ten minutes. The first to ask was the neighbour across the way, who put down her hose to come over. The second was the lady from the village office, who had come round with the keys and asked before she had handed them over. The third was a woman collecting her post at the letterboxes, who said she had been carrying her washing in an old fruit box since her husband died and would I please write down the name.

Graham, who was in charge of the boxes and nothing else, said I had put more thought into the baskets than Lyn had put into the removalists. He was not wrong.

The second one is the Pearl

The Pearl was meant to be mine. I bought it for the beach towels, because the grandkids start swimming as soon as the weather turns, and every summer the wet towels end up in a heap on the laundry floor.

It is the other mood entirely. Sea turtles in navy and gold and pale blue, swimming up through blue waves, with coral and shells and little gold starfish round the bottom, and a sandy cuff with a fine gold trim along it. It is the same quilted basket as the Honey, just made for the water.

Lyn took one look at it on the path and said the turtles were staying. She has a bathroom with blue tiles, and she said it was the first thing in the whole move that matched anything. So the Pearl stayed at Mittagong, we stopped for a pie at Berrima on the way home, and I ordered myself another one from the passenger seat before we were back on the highway.

Three things I have learned since

One. The back of a thing matters. With the picture going all the way round, there is no good side and bad side. It can sit anywhere, facing any way.

Two. Standing up matters more than you think. A basket that stands on its own, even empty, is a basket you stop noticing in the best possible way.

Three. Buy the one you would lend. If you would be embarrassed to carry it up somebody else’s path, you should not be carrying it up your own hall either.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me stop and think.

The small is $73.95. It was $148.00. The medium is $86.95, down from $174.00, and the large is $102.95, down from $206.00.

My first thought was that this was a lot of money for something to put washing in. Then I worked out that I had spent thirty years with a basket I was ashamed of, and that seemed like the worse deal.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is nobody in the middle taking a cut, and they run a spring sale to make room before summer.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and read the reviews before I ordered the second Pearl. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman from Moss Vale had written, “Mine lives in the hallway now because it is too nice to keep in the laundry. My sister has already asked for one.” That was the one that settled it.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat on Lyn’s new back step with a cup of tea, looking at the blossom, this is what I would say.

Go and look at your laundry basket. Properly look. If you would not lend it to a friend, it does not deserve to be the thing you carry every single day.

Two practical things. The spring sale is on now, and the medium is the size that goes first. And there are about thirty designs, so if bees and turtles are not you, there will be one that is. Once this first run is gone, it is gone.

I own a laundry basket I would lend anyone now. I just do not always get it back.

Dianne