In a great display of love and affection, my husband assisted me in folding a towering mound of clean laundry that I had hastily thrown onto our bed before dashing to the couch to view “Mad Men.” Granted, this laundry gift was bestowed only after Scott saw the look of defeat in my eyes when he so callously suggested that we dump the entire newly cleaned pile of clothes onto the dirty floor and just climb into bed. But a gift is a gift and I’ll take it.

As I am loathe to prevent future laundry gifts, I will refrain from comment on such things as folding style and technique, arrangement of piles in an ORDERLY fashion or full comprehension of the entire family’s wardrobe (so one might have the ability to IMMEDIATELY identify each piece of clothing, ACCURATELY determine its owner and NEATLY place the item onto the appropriate pile). These things take practice.

We had “good talks, good talks” (a now famous phrase in my family’s lexicon, coined as it was by my beloved cousin Eric Wright) about our kids and their current clothes sizes, laundry detergents and the differences between the old fashioned durable washing machines and dryers from our childhood and those less reliable machines of today.

This “husband and wife laundry time,” though certainly not as flirty as the “hot scenes” we had just witnessed on the television show, set me in a mood of love/lust that left me giggling and dizzy. The man standing across from me, folding his daughter’s “Dora” undies in half and adding them to the “Gigi” pile, had never looked more handsome. His torn t-shirt pulled taut across his bicep as he reached for a sock, his day-worn jeans sagged low, revealing dimples in his lower back, as he bent over to set a pile of clothes on the floor. I was full of gratitude for all the gifts that have been bestowed upon me…my husband…my children…the laundry. The days often run together in a blur of activities, chores and doing, doing and doing…until one of these precious moments grabs me and holds me still. Despite my swooning, sleepy state, I was conscious enough to stop, observe and study that most important person in my existence as he stacked our family’s clothes, this man who chose to walk his life beside me, on his own path certainly, but close enough to mine that we can still hold hands and together, fold some laundry.