The last time my whole family did laundry together, which wasn’t planned.

It was a Tuesday night, somewhere between dinner dishes and my usual habit of checking work emails I didn’t really need to check.

Our washing machine had stopped mid-cycle again, and my wife yelled from the hallway:

“Ming! Can you help? The clothes are sitting in water!”

I sighed, dragged myself over, and opened the machine. My son, Leo, wandered in with his headphones around his neck. My daughter, Emily, came out of her room because she “heard a commotion.”

Five minutes later, the three of us were kneeling on the floor, pulling soggy T‑shirts and socks into a plastic basin so we could restart the cycle.

It should have been annoying. It was late. Everyone was tired. The laundry room floor was freezing.

But then something small and unexpected happened.

“Dad, this shirt is from my first tennis match,” Emily said, holding up a faded green T-shirt. “Remember? You yelled louder than my coach.”

Leo snorted. “You still yell, by the way.”

I laughed. “That was encouragement, not yelling.”

Emily rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

Soon, every piece of clothing became a memory:
• The hoodie Leo wore on our first trip to New York.
• The pajama pants my wife bought me the winter we could barely afford Christmas presents.
• The T-shirt from the community fundraiser Emily organized for a local food bank.

We started telling stories, interrupting each other, arguing over details, correcting each other’s timelines. It was chaotic but it felt alive.

After we restarted the machine, no one left.

Instead, we stayed and started folding the dry clothes from the previous load. It became an unspoken teamwork: Leo matched socks, Emily folded shirts, I handled towels. Someone put music on. Someone started dancing badly on purpose.

At one point, Emily said, “I like this. It feels… I don’t know. Like when we were younger.”

I almost said, “We can do this more often,” but stopped myself.

Because the truth is, we probably wouldn’t.

Everyone’s schedules are full- school, work, clubs, internships, social lives I only hear about in fragments. Trying to recreate a moment exactly as it happened is like trying to force a plant to grow faster by pulling its leaves.

Instead, I just said, “Yeah. Me too.”

That night, after everyone went to bed, I walked past the now-quiet laundry room.

The basin was empty. The clothes were folded. But the warmth from earlier still lingered, like steam fading after a hot shower.

I realized something:

As parents, we spend so much energy planning big things - vacations, enrichment activities, structured family time. We forget that connection often arrives in the small accidents: a broken washer, a shared task, a pile of clothes that turns into a pile of stories.

My kids are growing up fast. Soon they’ll be doing their laundry in dorm basements and tiny apartments with coin-operated machines.

They probably won’t remember how perfectly we folded the shirts that Tuesday night.

But maybe, just maybe, they’ll remember how it felt to sit on a cold floor with their father, laughing over a spilled basin and a life we built together, one sock at a time.