Early in our marriage, my wife and I lived in an uninsulated, two-bedroom house in Arlington, Virginia, which we rented from a woman who had been in the area since the Truman administration. We were always getting into scrapes with her—not because of mutual dislike, I think, but because the interests of landladies and renters are often opposed.

My most vivid memory from those days is the time our dryer broke down. I called our landlady. She didn’t believe me. After all, she had only bought the thing two years ago. It couldn’t already be breaking. Well, no, I assured her two weeks later. The dryer only starts when I give it a kick. I have to tape the door shut to keep it running. “That’s normal,” she replied. I was too timid to call her again until the day it stopped running altogether.

“Don’t you think I’m going to buy a new one,” she told me, and gave me the number of a repairman. I called him up, and his wife told me he’d come over soon. Now my repairman—let’s call him Sam—was perhaps the last of his kind. He and his wife, longtime Arlington residents, owned an appliance repair company that they ran out of their kitchen. Sam’s wife handled the business end (mostly taking calls on their home phone), while Sam did the handiwork. He drove a white pickup truck and worked with a basic toolkit, the sort you can find at Home Depot.

I took Sam to my basement and explained the problem. My dryer ran slowly, and then it didn’t run at all. Not much more to the story. “Okay,” he said. “I know how to fix this.” He opened up his toolkit and began taking the thing apart. When he had finished dismantling the dryer, he put it back together. Ah, I thought—the oldest trick in the book. “There,” he said. “Should be fine now.”

And he was right. For a few hours, the dryer ran like a dream. I completed one load. But the next day, I found myself on the phone with Sam’s wife again. Same problem, I told her. I think the door sensor is broken. “That’s too bad,” she replied. “Sam is booked. Would next week work?”

I thought about it for a moment. My wife and I really needed to do our laundry. We couldn’t wait a week. And my landlady had made it clear that Sam was the best deal in Northern Virginia; she wasn’t going to shell out for anyone else. But there were other considerations, too, the sort of hare-brained thoughts that only enter the head of a desperate renter. I had never done a load of laundry in Ohio, for instance. Now seemed as good a time as any to try it.

No, I replied after a pause. Next week won’t work. Maybe not next month either. I will let you know.

Then came a long period of wandering. My wife and I loaded our station wagon with suitcases full of dirty clothes and for the next few months we drove around the country doing laundry at friends’ houses. We dried clothes in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Nebraska—a relentless push west until the circumstances of daily life called us home.

By then, I had grown used to our way of life. There didn’t seem to be a point in fixing the dryer, especially when every few weeks I could take our sopping wet clothes over to my parents’ house and run a cycle while I caught up with my brothers. So I delayed in calling Sam, and I pushed off updating my landlady.

But around Christmas, a long email shook me to my senses. My landlady informed me that since Sam had not actually fixed my dryer, she had no intention of paying him. And, she added, Sam’s wife had just told her that she and her husband were shutting down the business in a few months. If Sam didn’t fix the dryer before he retired, my landlady said, he would never see a dime.

I liked Sam and hadn’t realized that he had not been paid. So I called his wife, and she said that he was available the next day. When he showed up, we repeated the same ritual. He took the dryer apart while I got him a cup of coffee.

“These damn things weren’t built to last,” he said as he installed a new door sensor. “They all become trash in a few years. Everything does.” When Sam finished, he left in a huff. He retired several weeks later. I am told my old landlady hasn’t bothered to fix the dryer since.

This essay appeared in the Trinity 2025 issue of The Lamp.