Old Time Laundry

Lin Chen had never met his grandfather. After his grandmother was hospitalized, he returned to the old street from the provincial capital and took over the small old-time laundry shop. The knob of the washing machine had to be turned smoothly, the belt of the dryer could not last for forty minutes, the sewing machine in the corner was covered with dust, and there was a roll of dark red thread stuck on the spool - it had not been touched for decades. He knows nothing and washes his clothes every day and starts over again. Then he discovered something: every time he washed a hundred pieces of clothing, a rag would fall out of the drum. The gray-blue one has the smell of grass after the rain, the gardenia one has the astringent smell of ink, and the dark gray one has the residual warmth of camphor and the sun. There is something sewn on the back of each piece of cloth with dark red thread - ripples, writing, a twisted flower. He picked it up piece by piece, and the people around him talked about it sentence by sentence. Grandma said that he jumped into a river to fish for people when he was eight years old. Uncle Chen said that he had been sewing patches all his life. My sister said that the index finger of his left hand was full of needle holes and his fingers were cold when he combed his braids. Seven pieces of rags were put together to form a little old man puppet as big as a palm. Ugly, missing one eye. The night Lin Chen sewed it up, it came alive. Only he can see it. It sits by the ironing machine every night, gently touching old, unclaimed clothes with its cloth hands. Later, there was a line of stitches on its chest: "Thank you, I have found many temporary homes." Then it turned back into a regular old piece of cloth. But from that day on, every piece of clothing left behind in the laundry will be picked up by the person who "just needs it" within a week. Lin Chen had never met his grandfather. But those rags collected all the stitches in his grandfather's life for him.