Laundry

You know it's a good day when you go to the beauty shop in the morning and get a hot fudge sundae in the afternoon. Ah, yes. The only thing that could make it better is......yes, I'm going to say it....warm weather! With all this switching back and forth, I'm now flirting with my first cold in a couple of years. My sinuses are all stuffy and my throat is scratchy. I don't feel bad during the day, but in the late afternoon it settles in for the night. Poor hubby didn't get a lot of sleep last night – I kept waking us both up! I'll dig in my pharmaceutical stash and see if I can find something to keep the sinuses more clear tonight.

It was a perfect day for a steamy pot of ham and beans for lunch. The house smelled so good all morning. When I was growing up, I can't imagine how many pots of beans we had. Like a lot of moms, mine put on a pot of beans every Monday so it could cook while we did the laundry. Laundry could take all morning, and it was nice to have lunch ready when we finished up.

Mom had a wringer washer until she moved into her retirement apartment in 1992. They were pretty durable and rarely needed work. On the farm, the washer stayed in what we called the Pantry, a small ante-room off the kitchen. Since we didn't have running water in the house, wash day always started with carrying bucket after bucket of water from the well to the washing machine. Once it was filled, an electric water heater would be put in to heat the water up. The rinse tub would be set up and more water hauled from the well to fill it.

Once that was all done, the laundry would be sorted – for us, it was making piles on the floor in the pantry of the different loads. Bluing was added to the rinse water, and more water was heated to make liquid starch for the ironing items. When the water in the washer was sufficiently heated, the heating element was removed and laundry was started, beginning with socks and underwear (white, of course), then sheets, towels, and working our way down to finish with the jeans or throw rugs.

Each item had to be removed from the washer and run through the wringer individually, being very careful to run them through the wringer smoothly – the wringer could be murder on buttons or zippers. Sometimes the water was so hot you'd need to use something to fish out the items of clothing so you didn't burn your hands. Once the washer was emptied, the next load of clothes was put in and the agitator started. The washed clothes were sloshed around in the rinse tub, then run one at a time through the wringer into the clothes basket. Anything that needed to be ironed would be pulled out and dipped in liquid starch, then wrung out by hand.

Even hanging the laundry was a fine science. Mom's clothesline was strung around trees in the back yard. Where you started hanging clothes and the direction they were hung on the clothesline depended on how the breeze was blowing. After that was checked out, the clothes could be anchored to the clothesline with pins. By the time the first load was hung, the second load was washed and ready to be rinsed – and so it would go, all morning.

When the last thing was hung on the line, it was time to clean up. The water would be drained out of the rinse tub and then the washer one bucketful at a time. Some water would be used to water the flowers in the front yard. Other water was used to scrub the floor in the kitchen and in the pantry. Any water left after that was sloshed across the front porch to clean it off. By the time everything was wiped down and put back in its place, we were more than ready to sit down and have lunch.

Mid to late afternoon, we would check the clothes and started taking everything off the line and bringing it in, folding everything as we brought it in the house. The ironing would be set aside in a clothes basket, to be sprinkled with water and rolled into tight rolls so the dampness would cling to the fabric until the ironing was done the next morning. Hubby mentions some days that I've worked reallly hard doing laundry.......I know it's a piece of cake compared to growing up on the farm.