Why am I in the basement?

Adam played with the hose Monday night and came in with wet shoes. On Tuesday morning, getting him dressed, I asked May if his shoes were dry. She checked and reported that they were pretty wet. I told her to put them in the dryer for a few minutes. She went to the basement, stayed gone for a few minutes, and then came back carrying the shoes. "These are really wet," she said. "He can't wear these."

"Exactly," I said, "that's why you took them to the basement--to put them in the dryer." "Oh," she said, and went back to the basement.

A few minutes later, she was back. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing in the basement," she told me. And then I remembered what I was dealing with. We forget, sometimes, how confusing a simple task can get. "Let's go take a look," I said.

In the basement, I found the dryer running. "What's in there?" I asked. "I don't know," she said. I opened the door and found white things spinning, still quite wet. They hadn't been in there long. "Where are Adam's shoes?" "I don't know."

I looked in the washing machine, and there were the shoes, on top of clean clothes that were still wet, apparently from yesterday's wash. "Take the clothes out of the dryer and put them in the washer," I said. She started removing the clothes from the washer. "No, don't do that. Don't take wet clothes out of the washer just to put other wet clothes into it." She said she didn't want to mix the two batches. So I closed the washer lid and piled the clothes from the dryer on top of it, took a few towels-waiting-to-be-washed from a pile on the floor, tossed them into the dryer with the shoes, and we were back on-task.

I haven't posted in a while. But I woke up this morning with those words: "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing in the basement." It seemed like I should write about it.