Be a Hoopy Frood who Really Knows Where His or Her 6-Piece Towel Sets Are

At my house, we go through towels and washcloths like a Greek wedding caterer goes through china. Hand towels, bath towels, shop towels, dishrags, you name it. It’s towelapalooza over here.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was a young, single fellow, it seemed like a towel could go a week before it needed freshening. Now, maybe I was gross, and should have done laundry more frequently. That could very well be true. But it’s also true that one person, exercising a little bit of personal neatness, can get pretty good mileage out of a towel.

That was the old days. Now I have a pair of young children in my house. They’re awesome. They’re funny, they’re smart, they’re creative, they’re considerate — but they are not fastidious. Every meal generates a kitchenwide debris field of graham-cracker crumbs and spaghetti-sauce splatters. Their hands are constantly covered in dirt, or paint, or food, or Play-Doh, or homemade slime. (I hope that was homemade slime.) Every time they do wash their hands, there’s a 60% chance the hand towel will land on the bathroom floor. In a matter not unrelated to this question of their personal cleanliness, that bathroom floor is a horror show. Towels that touch it are instantly retired.

We need a mountain of towels. The towel supply in our linen closet is always running low. We could wash a load of towels every day just to keep up. I mean, it’s, like, hard to imagine how many towels we’d have to own before I started thinking we had too many. A roomful? Opening the door to such a room, as if in one of those dreams where you discover previously unknown chambers within your house, I would be so relieved. Thank Crom, I would think, there are clean towels. We always need more towels.

I hesitate to even share this, but: My spouse and I split the job of administering the kids’ baths. Imagine my dismay to learn the washcloth I’d considered one child’s face-rag was the same one she’d considered the other child’s butt-rag.

Aaaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhh, we need more towels.

But maybe you live with fewer people than I do. Or maybe the people in your house are just better at domestic hygiene. Maybe, at your place, you can use a washcloth, wring it out, hang it up, and come back to it a day later confident it hasn’t meanwhile been in anyone’s crack.

Even so. Sooner or later, you’re going to have a house guest. Or an overnight romantic partner. Or new babies. Or all three, in that order. “Nah,” you’re thinking, “I’ll maintain my current, tidy, childless/empty-nest/monastic/solitary lifestyle in perpetuity. The two bath towels I own now will see me through.”

I used to think that too. I was wrong. And even if I’d been right? Pressure cookers fail. Aquariums leak. Cats have kittens. Blood spills in kitchen mishaps. Miniraft sails tear as you’re drifting the River Moth. A time is coming – for you as it did for me, as it does for us all – when you are going to wish you had a ton more towels. Start stockpiling now.