Descriptive Essay Example (With Line-by-Line Breakdown)

The laundromat on Fifth and Jackson opens at 6 a.m. and the first thing it smells like, before the soap and the hot dryer lint, is iron — the clean metallic smell that comes off the rows of silent washing machines while they are still cold and the pipes behind the wall have not started to move water. The fluorescent lights are two-thirds working. The third row, closest to the window, is dark, and the dark row is where the regulars go, the way people choose a booth at a diner because it is theirs, not because it is the best one. On a Tuesday morning in March, there are four people in the laundromat besides me. There is a woman in her sixties in a wool coat the color of oatmeal, sitting in the plastic chair bolted to the wall, reading a paperback with the cover folded back so I cannot see what it is. There is a man in a blue jumpsuit with "Raul" stitched above the chest pocket, loading a double-capacity front-load machine with towels that have the grey-white color of towels that have been washed a thousand times in industrial detergent. There is a father with a toddler asleep in a stroller, and the father is folding a tiny sweatshirt that has the word BEAR on it in letters the size of his thumb. And there is the attendant behind the counter, whose name I do not know, reading a phone. The sound is the thing you do not expect if you have never been in a laundromat at this hour. It is not the roar of machines. It is a kind of steady hush — the bass hum of the big commercial dryers, the higher whir of the front-loaders in spin cycle, the papery shuffle of the woman in the oatmeal coat turning a page, and under all of it the faint buzz of the broken fluorescent in the third row. When one of the dryers finishes its cycle the buzzer goes off and everybody looks up for a second and then looks back down, and the hush returns. It is the most peaceful room I have been in in weeks. What the laundromat does, more than any other public space I can think of in this part of the city, is let people be alone in the company of other people. Nobody talks. Nobody is expected to. The woman in the oatmeal coat does not explain what she is reading. Raul does not explain the towels. The father does not try to wake the toddler. The attendant does not offer to help because nobody needs help. We are all here for the same hour, washing the same clothes, and the fact that we do not speak is the agreement the room is built on. Outside the window, Fifth Avenue is starting to wake up: a truck pulling a produce delivery into the bodega across the street, a woman walking a small tan dog that keeps stopping to smell the wet pavement, the garbage truck grinding through its pickup on the opposite corner. Inside the laundromat, none of that feels like it is happening to us. The machines keep their rhythm. The woman turns another page. In about twenty minutes my own load will be done and I will fold it here, next to the dark row under the broken fluorescent, and I will leave the laundromat before it stops being the thing it is at 6 a.m. and starts being the thing it is at 10.