Tieja MacLaughlin is a communications strategist, publicist and crisis manager.

 Is anyone else nostalgic about laundrymats? Every weekend as a kid, my parents (er, mum) would drag us to the laundrymat to wash my dads work clothes. Despite having a fully functioning laundry machine of our own. But mum was weird like that, she didn’t want to use them and wreck them, so, load into the old Buick and off we’d go. Man; I fucking hated those trips. But in hindsight, it was one of the most consistent and memorable routines we had as a family, and I’m thankful for that. It was also a time to bond with dad doing homework, workbooks, or reading. Sometimes practicing my dance routines on the field out front. (On one particular occasion I remember my mum and dad trying to do headstands - it’s weird the things we remember, right?) Or fending my little shit of a brother off (he was a little shit at the time). If we behaved, my brother and I would get Dairy Queen too! And mum would be there scrubbing the stains off our clothes, and then she’d spend hours using the “clothes shaver” (one of those infomercial type gadgets) to get those little fuzzy balls off our socks. I’ll admit, I didn’t see a fuzzy ball of lint on my socks until I was a grown adult. I’ve never seen someone wash clothes as good as my mother. Anyways. Yeah, I guess laundrymat shaped my youth. And how symbolic of the circular movement of life - the wash, rinse, dry, get dirty, repeat...