A dream

Last night I had a dream about laundry.

We were still living in our old house in Taman Hussein. In my dream I saw myself lugging our big laundry basket full of damp, freshly-washed clothes up the stairs as I normally do every other evening. Just about after dinnertime, eight-ish. Our washing machine is downstairs in the wet kitchen whilst our clothes are hung to dry in the upstairs balcony, you see. I have to stop to rest for a couple of seconds every 7 or 8 steps because the load is rather heavy. After clumsily heaving the laundry basket into my parents' room, I let it down with a sigh of relief, and turn on the lights. I remember what my parents' room looks like. The parquet flooring. The blue clock with a picture of two puppies, hanging on the wall above the queen-sized bed. The light blue wooden door, with the white iron grille behind it, leading to the balcony. Before I start my chore, I turn on my mom's old Panasonic radio and jack up the volume so I can hear it from the balcony. 105.7FM. I was always a Light&Easy fan, even since late primary school days. Sometimes 94.5FM - Aldeena's Love Songs and Dedications. Don't know if they still have that nowadays. Anyways. I take the keys to the iron grille from a green tray on my mom's dressing table - this green tray has since then been transferred to my brother's room in our current house, and now holds all my contact lens solutions, cosmetics and whatnots on a small table right next to me as I type this.

I unlock the iron grille. It doesn't make a loud, clattering noise like the one downstairs does and the key turns with ease, also unlike the one downstairs. I can almost feel it right now. A smooth, clean turn; noiseless except for a soft click.

Now I am hanging out the clothes to dry on the big white-and-red clothes rack thingy. It is old and rickety, tilts at an angle and doesn't run very smoothly on its four wheels. Much like one of those trolleys in Heathrow airport. You push it in one direction but it refuses to go in that direction. There is a smaller clothes hanger - the 'umbrella' kind - with about 12 spokes to hang stuff on. I can't remember what colour it is. Was it pink? Or green? My sister's smaller items of clothing and the family's undergarments go there.

I don't know why I've written so much about some seemingly insignificant and irrelevant dream about doing laundry, but this is the only dream about my past, my childhood/younger days, that I've had in a long long time. And that is why it is significant to me. (=