"Much of my life is waiting. Waiting to go out, waiting to come in. Waiting to go to work, recreation, standing in the lunch line, canteen line, and waiting for the mail. There was a terrible time in my life when I had to wait in the laundry line. Actually the laundry line wasn't really a line to do laundry, it was a line to sign a sheet of paper that booked me a spot in a line to do the laundry.

The laundry sign-up and its attendant waiting made people very angry. I have heard that in the men's prisons fights break out over weight equipment, drugs and gang allegiance. In the three women's prisons where I have lived, fights are often over the laundry.

The larger problem for me, waiting in the laundry line, is that early on I was marked as a laundry wimp. I always ended up with no dryer time or the broken washing machine. Therefore, because I didn't enter the laundry ring with the appropriate zeal and ferocity that was essential to get my clothes washed, my roommates learned not to entrust me with this responsibility.

They handled it.

From time to time, however, I have had to glove up and step up. And, in my determination to disprove my current roommate's gloomy predictions of my laundry performance, I would arrive at the black cabinet that's our waiting station two hours early.

I chose my spot and hunkered down to do battle all the while mumbling my self-talk, 'You can do this! Stand your ground!' Unexpectedly, uninvited, a woman with the bumbling demeanor of a newborn puppy, plopped down beside me.

Her benign gentleness did not bolster my enthusiasm for the battle ahead.

The conversation quickly petered out and reading my book was like chewing wallpaper. So with a deep inward sigh, I turned to my companion-in-waiting and asked her what she wanted to do with her time.

'Learn something,' she replied slowly. She shifted heavily in her chair and peeped at me, 'Tell me something you know.' My mind blanked. I stared at her and she stared back at me with her glassy doe eyes. Panic clutched at a me. It was so silly! What did I know that could possibly interest this woman? The hole of silence ripped larger. Then I had it. I would teach her to crochet.

Elbow to elbow we waited in the laundry line. I taught her fingers how to hold the yarn and gray plastic hook and how to create the stitches.

'Look,' she smiled hugely and held up a lopsided granny square.

'You taught me to make something!'

'You taught me something too,' I replied.

'I did?' Her head tilted to the side and her forehead wrinkled.

'You sure did--It's how to wait for Godot that counts.'

'What's that?' she giggled.

'You taught me to live while I wait. But wouldn't you know--when I finally got the hang of waiting in the laundry line, they changed the system!" (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, September 17, 2003).

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. She is serving a 90 year sentence as an accessory to the murder of her parents in 1985. This column was first printed as part of a series, under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'