“During times I’ve felt like throwing in the towel, I keep going when I realize that means one more piece of laundry to deal with.”
— Modern-day motivational message
Laundry. Who really enjoys the sorting, washing, drying, folding, and hanging up? Makes me tired just thinking about it.
Reminiscing the history of wash day blues crossed my mind last week while helping a friend shop for a new washing machine. And wow, was it an eyeopener to learn what washing and hanging out is like in 2022.
Washing and hanging out for my grandmother was rooted more than a century ago. She was born in 1905 and died in 1993, never having owned a washing machine of any kind.
As per the custom in her day, washday was Monday. Unless it rained. Then it was moved to the next sunny day unless that fell on that one day washing was taboo. I don’t remember what day that was, but my “faithful member of the Pittsburg First Methodist Church until her death” grandmother was superstitious. So, according to her, it was bad luck to wash on that day of the week.
I’m not superstitious, but I do have one day that I consider lousy luck for laundry. That’s any day I have to do it.
My grandparents lived just three blocks from downtown. Yet their backyard would have been common sight half a day’s drive down a dirt road. My grandfather’s large hen house hinted of the half dozen chickens roaming the yard at any time. Between that henhouse and the tool shed was a grape arbor that produced the best tasting green grapes ever to grace a kid’s summertime palate.
The arbor shaded a long homemade wooden bench serviced by a single water faucet rising straight out of the ground about mid-way. And hanging on the side of a tool shed just steps away under a massive pecan tree were two number-2 galvanized washtubs. Completing the picture was a half-a-block long clothesline and an iron pot to heat washday water.
A fire under that washpot by the time breakfast was over at 7 a.m. every Monday and Granny headed out the kitchen door with her scrub board and soap bar signaled, “laundry day was a go.”
Her diligent routine took all morning. Hauling hot water from the iron pot, manually rubbing each piece on the scrub board in one tub and rinsing in the other before handwringing and hanging. It never varied. Finally, with laundry on the line and washtubs on the tool shed wall, it was time to cook lunch.
My mother, who once said doing the laundry made her feel like people were living in her house she had not met, had one of the tubs on wheels when I was a kid. The kind with a wringer attached. A clothesline did the drying, and the machine sat in the kitchen corner when not in use.
Memory doesn’t serve me well for her first “automatic” washer, but Mom also had dedicated days for laundry. Hers had nothing to do with superstition. It did dictate my afterschool schedule, however. In grade school, ironing was one of my household chores if I expected to collect a 25¢ allowance on Saturday.
Mom’s first “laundry room” was after moving to Mount Pleasant in 1959. But it wasn’t in the house. It was in a closet out in the garage. After the move to Delafield Street, the laundry room was in the kitchen. Or should I say the kitchen was the laundry room? At least she didn’t have to wait until after breakfast to do laundry. She could multitask and do both at the same time.
But what if my parents or grandparents had access to today’s devices? The selection of “mechanized wash tubs” sends my mind into spin cycle.
Up to 12 cycles. Mine has three: white, color, and permanent press. So, what other kinds of clothes do they make that I don’t know about? And programable actions with WIFI connectivity? I am already connected to the point that when Center’s “less-than -reliable” internet goes down, I’m out of not only computer service but also useless is my television, telephones, music, climate control system, and home security. And now I’m supposed to risk losing control of laundry, as well?
So here I am, way ahead of Granny’s scrub board and somewhere between mom’s wringer washing machine and futuristic online laundry devices. However, I’ve decided that it would not matter in which generation I chose to do laundry. My system would be the same as it has always been.
Thirty minutes to wash, an hour to dry, and seven to ten business days to fold and put away.
