The Great Laundry Adventure
The Great Laundry Adventure
by Margie Rutledge
illustrations by Maxine Cowan
Text © 1999 Margie Rutledge
Illustrations © 1999 Maxine Cowan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
Cover art: Chrissie Wysotski
Napoleon gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.
| Napoleon PublishingToronto, Ontario, Canada |
 |
09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rutledge, Margie, date
ISBN 0-929141-67-9
I. Cowan, Maxine, date. II. Title.
PS8585.U864G73 1999 jC81’.54 C99-931192-1
PZ7.R938G73 1999
For my parents
and
for E, J, V
with love.
Acknowledgments
Little Star by Aline Rutledge
A Card Game in the Dark by Espe Currie
Roncesvalles Lovers by Margie Rutledge
The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard (excerpt)
by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by A. L. Lloyd from
The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, copyright© 1955
by New Directions Publishing Corp.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Chapter One
The Beginning: A Solution
Abigail Jacob and Ernest lived in a house without closets. It was an old house: older than your mother or your grandmother or even your great-grandmother. The hallways were excellent for sock-skating, and they joined together rather like a maze (except without closets, there weren’t so many dead ends).
It was a house the children spent a lot of time in because, like many modern children, Abigail, Jacob and Ernest were not free. They did not explore the streets and alleys and ravines looking for adventure. Their outings to High Park or the waterfront or along the Humber River (for our children lived in Toronto) were always with an adult who never let them out of sight. And it was a bother always to be in sight, a bother to the children and a bother to their parents. In warm weather, they played in the back garden, but city gardens rarely have the secret places children most enjoy.
It was lucky that the children had a big, untidy house in which to play, and it was even luckier the children had large, unruly imaginations.
At the time of this story, Abigail was ten years old and the eldest of the three. By the time this story was over, Abigail had grown up a lot very quickly, but that’s jumping ahead. In any case, like both her brothers, Abigail had clear blue eyes. She had beautiful waist-length wavy brown hair and though she could have been very vain about it, she thought of it mostly as a nuisance and often pleaded with her mother to cut it. Her mother resisted because the hair made Abigail look special, as if she were not entirely of her own time.
Jacob, who was seven, had been very blond as a baby, but his hair had darkened somewhat. On first impression, he seemed older than his years, but he had been that way since he was an infant. His height and slenderness, along with the paleness of his complexion, gave him a frail quality, though he was actually quite athletic.
Ernest was four and something of a perpetual motion machine. He was between Abigail and Jacob in colouring and had the same blue eyes. He loved to talk, and his family could always track his location in that big house by the sound of his voice. He talked himself into wakefulness in the morning, talked and muttered through the day and then talked himself to sleep again at night.
But back to the house without closets, for the lack of closets posed a problem for the Lawrence family.
This problem was made worse by the fact that no one in the family had a chest of drawers that worked. Drawers got stuck, or the knobs fell off, and why struggle to put clothes in if you were so soon to take them out again?
Most clothes were kept in the parents’ bedroom: a room with eleven walls (Jacob liked to count them) painted Cleopatra blue. One rarely noticed the Cleopatraness though, because on one side of the room was a four-foot high pile of clean clothes and on the other side of the room was a four-foot high pile of dirty clothes.
Every morning when the children had to get dressed, they would dive into the pile of clean clothes and thrash about until they found socks, a pair of underwear, a shirt and maybe jeans or overalls. No one ever found a pair of socks, and it was a family belief that only nerds wore matching socks. Some mornings the search for clothes was an adventure, and on other mornings it was a catastrophe. The worst days were when the pile of clean clothes would get mixed up with the pile of dirty clothes, and the children’s mother would insist on inspecting everything because she didn’t want her children going out of the house in dirty clothes.
“Disorganization is one thing, but slovenliness is quite another,” she would say while spit-cleaning spaghetti sauce off a shirt sleeve and then handing it to a child. After a momentary burst of attention to domestic detail, the mother would invariably drift downstairs to the piano and play The Queen of the Night’s aria over and over and over. She loved her children very much, but she was a little dreamy.
If the mother was a little dreamy, the father was a man of action, albeit a crusty man of action. For a number of years the laundry situation had bothered him, and for a few years after that, it had troubled him. He was on the verge of real annoyance on the morning he almost had to borrow Jacob’s Boston Bruins sweater (which was about eighteen sizes too small) because he couldn’t unearth a clean sweater of his own.
“This is madness,” Jacob said to Abigail when he saw his father measuring the sweater across his chest. And the father had to agree. There had to be a solution. It was fortunate for the family that Abigail, Jacob and Ernest were imaginative and competent beyond their years.
“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves!” announced Abigail.
“Huh?” Jacob responded.
“You know—jars full of treasure and jewels and olive oil,” said Abigail.
“Yeah, olive oil,” Ernest agreed.
Jacob, who was sometimes very literal-minded, asked: “You think we should wear olive oil instead of clothes?”
“No, no, no, no,” insisted Abigail. “The jars!”
“What about the jars?”
Abigail