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I try to visit my mom so I feel spiritually closer to her. Mainly, I return to one of our stomping grounds or something I know she loved, even if it's not in Arizona.. When I am in Arizona, I like to reminisce about the places we'd frequent, especially when I was a teenager and we'd go on quite a few mom-daughter dates - getting ice cream or lunch out somewhere. Many of these establishments have closed down in the past 5 years, a sad state of affairs and a sign of the economic downturn that hit the Phoenix area *very* hard.
Once place from my childhood that I have many memories of being with my mom that is *still* open with, hopefully, no signs of closing any day soon is the Country Club Laundromat, over on Southern and Extension in Mesa.
(In August 2009, when we lived in Chandler but were about to move to CA), we've had piles of laundry... well, piling up and it got to the point
that no matter how many loads I did at home, I couldn't keep up with it. So, I reconciled that I needed lots 'n lots of machines to do the job all at once. Naturally, I took the clothes to the one coin op I'm familiar with, which happens to be the one my mom and I visited when the washer broke or when we returned from a family vacation with tons of laundry or when it was raining too much outside to hang them on the lines. (We never owned a dryer.)The laundromat had the best vending machines -- always fully stocked and the sodas were always chilled to the max. As a child, I would entertain myself by pushing and pulling all the coin gadgets, opening and closing front-loading dryer doors, and rolling those awesome baskets around the smooth, shiny floors. My mom would always equip me with quarters to get a fun treat from the machines and she would relax on the park-bench style chair, most likely reader a romance novel. ;-)
That same exact laundromat doesn't disappoint. It's clean, cool, and the vending machines still offer the most chilled sodas you could ask for. I got myself a Coke, except, I can't manage to drink more than 1/4 of it, so it was mostly for nostalgiac purposes. The front windows are still immaculate and the lettering painted across them is still the same retro font from the 80s.
So, even though I had mountains of laundry to clean, I savored the calmness and relished in the simple memories. It seems to be the simplest things, like visiting the laundromat, that I remember most about my time with my mom.
