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Personal Narrative: Eli's House

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Most people look forward to many different things throughout the year, and a lot of the time it's the same couple of events. Of course there are holidays like Christmas and Easter, there are birthdays and festivals, trips to museums and amusement parks. Most of these I also look forward to, but what I anticipate the most is going to my cousin Eli’s house. Once or twice a year, I pack a bag with some clothes, my toothbrush and toothpaste, maybe a book, and I spend a week at his house. Eli lives a walking distance from Lake Erie in a quiet suburb in the town of Madison, Ohio. There is never really a special reason why I go to my cousins, there isn't a specific time of year; it could be in winter, sometimes in spring, any time that both me and …show more content…

Every night, at around ten pm, we all pile into the small purple car and drive to the laundromat to straighten things up for the next day's customers. We empty the trash cans and toss the trash bags into the dumpster. We sweep and mop the tiled floors, and clean huge mounds of lint out of the bottoms of the dryers. (The former is only done once every so often when the lint piles up, but it is one of the most exciting things you can do while cleaning a laundromat because of the potential for finding discarded money.) Walking through the glass doors of the laundromat, you are greeted with a faint smell of laundry detergent. There might still be a few people in the building, sitting in the plastic seats located by the back wall, playing pinball on an Addams Family pinball game, or just standing in front of the many dryers lining the walls. My uncle and aunt usually strike up a conversation with whoever is there while Eli and I start the process of straightening the place up. Inside the laundromat there are two aisles. The two aisles are split by a double row of washing machines with a small wooden table at the front end flanked on the left by a few arcade games and on the right by two vending machines. Eli and I usually start cleaning by getting a broom and a damp rag from the closet, then Eli sweeps the floor while I wipe the dust and dirt off the tables. The first couple of times I went to the laundromat I was mesmerized by how effortlessly Eli and his family did their jobs. Eli showed me the specific pattern that he used to mop the floor down one of the isles, then handed the mop to me and let me do the other side. The intricacies of the pattern were lost on me then, but after a couple of days practicing, I began to feel at home working in the laundromat. I had become part of the

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