The Dirty Laundry

After reading Elisavietta Ritchie's Sorting Laundry, I realized the symbolic meaning that the laundry played in the couple's lives. The laundry that the clearly female speaker is folding is her way of relating their lives to each other. The sorting of the laundry means that the couple is clearing doing very well. As we see in the third stanza, it is first clear the Ritchie is using the laundry as a metaphor for certain aspects of their relationships. "pillowcases, despite so many washings, seams still holding our dreams"(Ritchie, 841).  Initially, I passed over the "seams" in this poem as a the normal "seems".  However, doing so canceled out some of the deep meaning behind the previously stated.  The 'seams' that the speaker mentions is used as something to compare the strength of the relationship to.  By those seams still holding strong and that they are both still carrying dreams together, the readers are able to see that the relationship that the speaker obviously cares so much about is doing well.