He jumped out of bed and pulled the covers back to see how big the spot was; it was huge!
He looked down the front of his pajamas and saw that the crotch was soaked all the way to his thighs.
The comforter had small wet spots in places too!
How was he ever going to explain to Mrs Field?
He shucked his dripping pajamas and underwear and gathered up the damp bedclothes in a bundle and put it by the bedroom door.
Then he changed into a pair of dry briefs and put on a pair of pants and a shirt before taking the bundle down to the utility room to put in the wash.
Mrs Field was outside working in the garden as he passed through the kitchen with the dirty linen in his arms.
“He’s such a good boy,” she thought as she saw him walk by the kitchen window with the bundle in his arms,
“I’ve never had to tell him to clean up his room or put his laundry by the washer.
When I was his age, my mother had to ask me for a week to bring her my laundry.”
She bent over her plants and continued to hoe as Baby John John played happily in his playpen in the shade.
A half-hour later she was surprised by a blast of hot air on the backs of her legs.
She turned around to see where the air was coming from and was surprised to see that it was coming from the clothes dryer exhaust in the wall of the house.
“What is Theodore up to?”, she told herself as she snatched Baby John John from his playpen and hurried into the house to check on the dryer.
She expected Theodore to take his dirty clothes into the utility room for her to wash, but she hadn’t told him he could run her washer and dryer.
The thought of the damage an unbalanced load could do to her washer horrified her.
She had done it herself when she was young and her mother had never let her forget it.
After putting a load in the washer, Rose had sat in the family room and watched TV on a Saturday morning.
Water had flooded the washroom unseen and unheard, nearly destroying the washroom.
Her mother’s washer had ‘walked’ itself away from the wall and had broken the hose fitting on the water pipe inlet.
Rose remembered the howls of anger her father made when he found out that the sheetrock would have to be replaced in the wall and ceiling behind the washer.
He had been livid!
He had wanted to take it out of her allowance and was only deterred by the pleadings of her mother that it was an accident.