I have a confession to make. I love doing laundry.

I love the feeling that comes from taking stinky clothes and linens and turning them into soft, aromatic, objects of desire.

Well, maybe that's overstating it a bit but I do enjoy the satisfaction I get when I know we have fresh clean clothes to wear and crisp clean cotton sheets on the bed.

I love sorting colors and fabrics into little piles, washing them and then folding them piece by piece, still warm from the dryer. And, Lord thank you, I do love my own personal washer and dryer.

This is not to say, however, I've always enjoyed doing the laundry. There was a time early in my married life when I despised it.

Like many other young couples living in campus housing we all shared a common laundromat, usually located a country mile or two, and up a hill, from where we lived. I am permanently swaybacked from carrying not only loads and loads of laundry but ten rolls of quarters and a tenpound box of Tide with each run to the wash-house.

Then there was the lack of privacy. Doing laundry in my opinion should be a private act, not a team sport. I always felt others were analyzing the things in my basket much like people do in the supermarket. Gave me a creepy feeling. So did the sign over the door: DO NOT DYE IN THE MACHINE.

I always made sure our underwear was hidden way down in the bottom of the basket so I'd have plenty of time to case the joint for peeping toms before I jerked them up and stuffed them in the washer.

Most of the time though, the other wives (and a few husbands) were too busy hiding their own stained undergarments to pay attention to ours.

Another thing about using a public laundromat is that while your clothes are washing you're pretty much stuck there for the duration with absolutely nothing to do but stare into space or, well, stare at other people's dirty laundry.

If you left, you might return to find your wet clothes either lying on the floor or on a countertop, put there by someone who needed the washer before you returned. Or you might return and find your clothes had vanished. I was not willing to take that chance.

It's true, there were thieves even at University of Georgia Married Housing. Educated thieves but thieves nonetheless.

Occasionally women would talk to one another but it was hard to carry on a good conversation over the constant sloshing, agitating, and tumbling so most of the time we resorted to reading the instructions for loading the machines that were posted on the bulletin board: 1.Raise lid. 2. Pour in washing powder. 3.Insert coins. 4.Push lever to engage. 5.Sit down and keep an eye out for sexy undergarments in other people's baskets.

That is why back then I kept my washdays to a minimum. I determined that if the laundry basket were running over or if we had run out of underwear it was time to wash clothes. Either that or buy new ones. [Here's a tip: If your underwear is standing alone on the laundry room floor, it's time to wash.]

Needless to say, one of the happiest days of my life was the day I got my first brand-new washer and dryer. Kenmores, I think, in Harvest Gold. I thought I'd died and gone to laundry heaven.

I simply can't imagine what it must have been like for my grandmother to have washed clothes by hand on a rub-board and later a roller washing machine. (Family lore has it my aunt's hand once got caught in the rollers and it took all day to set her free.) I'm sure a laundromat would have been heaven for her.

I grew up watching Mama hang clothes on the clothesline out back of the house and I used to marvel at the way she connected each piece to the other before she pinned it. Occasionally I would help take them down when they were dry, if I could reach them that is. I can still remember the sweet smell of bedsheets fresh off the clothesline. They were stiff as horse hair but they surely did smell good.

One of my requests when we built our current house was that I have a clothesline out back. Hubby put one up for me, a long one held up at each end by tall cedar posts. I used it for about a year to air out winter clothes or an old quilt now and then. I tried hanging wet towels on the line but stopped doing that when my boys complained that when they dried off after a shower they felt like they'd been sandpapered.

The Bounce softener sheet was a wonderful invention as was Shout stain remover. I get so tickled at all the ads for stain removers. This lady will be holding up a man's T-shirt and say, "This new and improved Splash is guaranteed to remove even these tough blood stains from this shirt."

I'm thinking, if this guy's got bloodstains all over his T-shirt, maybe laundry isn't his biggest problem.

Yes, I have mistakenly dyed white things every color in the rainbow. I have shrunk many a man's sweater to Ken and Barbie size, I have washed receipts and paper towels, then picked hundreds of little paper bits off black pants and skirts, melted chewing gum and lipstick to almost every blouse I own, lost enough single socks to foot all our soldiers in Iraq, and laundered enough money to be audited by the IRS, but I still enjoy doing the laundry.

E.B. White, the author of the children's classic, Charlotte's Web, said this: "We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry."

And hey, I'm not big on grape-picking so…..doing laundry makes me happy. It's an idea whose time has come. Pass it on.