The Drying Room / der Trockenraum

The Drying Room. It could be the title of a novel in Oprah's Book Club, a book about a group of nondescript people living in a nondescript apartment building in some nondescript city. Their lives are connected, and complexly interconnected, through the drying room, the communal space in the basement where everyone comes to hang their laundry. Perhaps it would be a romance or a murder mystery or simply just a sad tale of nondescript people and their nondescript lives.

Our basement is creepy, there's no doubt about it. It is dark and the ceilings are low. There are lots of doors and odd divisions, segmenting the hallways in two directions leading from the staircase. There are cage-like storage compartments down there, one for each apartment. All but ours have cardboard completely covering every square inch of the wire compartments so that no one can see inside them. Why do people need to hide their stuff from each other? It elicits images of those Austrian cellar stories that pop into the news from time to time, the ones where people suddenly appear after having been locked in the basement for years and no one will admit to suspecting anything was amiss at all.

If you are brave enough to explore our basement, you can go through the bike storage room and into an odd vestibule where you will find the door into our drying room. It is directly across from a fenced off boiler-type contraption, and the heat from that, combined with three unusual pipes that are mounted on the ceiling in one part of the room, keeps the room curiously warm. Why either the pipes or the contraption are warm is a mystery since each apartment has its own water heater and its own heaters which, as you know, each light their own flame and make their own heat. Whatever the reason, warm they are, and it means that you can usually hang up a load of laundry one morning and find it dry and ready for folding the next.

You can see unusual things in the drying room -- the person who has an entire row's worth of socks in various gray tones or the person who doesn't seem to use soap and hangs stinky laundry up to dry. There are the people who forget their underwear down there for a week or more (what are they wearing??) and those who like to starch their curtains on a regular basis and let them drip dry onto the floor without cleaning up the white splatters. Some people seem to do laundry much more often than others, and it's amusing to try to figure out which laundry might go with which people.

We seem to be going through a phase where our laundry piles up incredibly fast and laundry needs to be done every day, and so I have been making lots of trips to the drying room. But something strange has happened: the drying room has stopped drying clothes. As it rained throughout June, the clothes took longer and longer to dry. Instead of one day, it would take two. And then things would take three days or more, until reaching the current state where nothing ever dries completely. Things that I washed over the weekend are still damp. Some things that I washed at the end of last week and are still damp have started to smell, and so I am washing them all over again. In fact, the whole drying room and its contents (rows and rows of people's clothes that have been trying to dry for quite some time) have become quite stinky. It's an odd musty, mildewy, stagnant smell that doesn't really do for laundry.

And so I've been forced, after months of avoiding the dryer and the wrath of Frau Dungtwig, to use the dryer once again. In my absence, the Frau has hung two additional signs on the dryer, for a total of three, demanding that people clean the lint filter AND the lint filter compartment after each use. I'd forgotten how soft a dryer makes clothes, and how quickly everything dries. So fast, in fact, that you can put them away the same day you wash them! What an amazing concept! But, for a book title, The Dryer doesn't quite conjure up the same marvelous premises as The Drying Room.