Doing laundry when I was growing up was much more involved than it is for me today. My girlfriends ask me “How can you like to do laundry?” and I usually just grin or shrug my shoulders. But the truth of the matter is that I don’t necessarily like doing laundry but that doing laundry with a washer and dryer is so easy! Even my children can do it! 
Imagine my mother raising six children on a farm without the modern washers and dryers we have in our homes today. There was endless amounts of laundry to do. My first memories of doing laundry was with a wringer washer at home.
The wringer washer was much like this one:
Except it was in the backyard… Yes, it was in our back yard. Which was fine… because remember, we had no neighbors. When a car went by our house it was an occasion to look and see who was going by!
We would fill that tub up with water and soap, plug it into electricity with an extension cord and the clothes would swish around. When my mother decided they were clean enough we would take each article of clothing, rinse them in another tub and run it through the wringer. You had to watch that fingers didn’t get squeezed in that wringer. My older brother had his arm trapped in there for a few minutes one day. (I wonder if that is why I only have that one and only memory of him helping to do the laundry.)
Then we would take baskets of wet laundry over to the clothes line and hang them to dry. We used long poles (The poles were cut out of a tree for that is where really long poles come from.) to hoist the clothes lines into the air. In the winter, we would hang our clothes to dry inside the house. The clothes always smelled like wood smoke. We’d also hang them outside during the winter and they would freeze on the clothesline. This gives me a entirely different idea of what freeze dried really means! Sometimes we would go to the laundry mat. There wasn’t enough laundry baskets in the world to hold everything so the surplus would go into trash bags. Once my Dad, Mom and myself were in a car accident on the way to the laundry mat…. All three of us squeezed into the front seat… laundry in the back seat. If you can imagine how many baskets of clothes that would be… six kids on a farm… two adults… OH MY GOODNESS! The mental picture of what this must of looked like on this day just makes me laugh now-a-days! Can you picture this?
I suppose some of this couldn’t help but affect me a bit. I remember tripping out some of my friends as an adult. Fifteen years ago, my husband and I lived just on the edge of suburbia, in a house with a long driveway years ago. We were in the process of saving as much money as we could for we were planning to relocate. And our dryer broke and it was summertime. And I knew we would be moving in a couple of months. The house wasn’t visible from the road. And I liked the idea of hanging my clothes on a clothesline at the time for that sunny fresh smell.
Okay I wasn’t really thinking that! We were just thinking let’s get the dryer when we move and it will be one less thing to move. So I had my husband run a clothesline pulley system from the top of my porch to the top of a tree. It went high, across our driveway. My friends would come to visit me and drive under the clothes drying. Talk about amazing some friends who had never seen such a creation! I still get a laugh when I remember the expressions on their faces when they realized they had just driven under my laundry hanging on a clothesline!
Fortunately this period in my life didn’t last long. I have never wanted to use a clothes line since! I got the new dryer as soon as we moved!
So if your reading this and you have a load of laundry to do… and your doing it in your own home with machines… go do it… and count your blessings!
Love to all!
Beth
P.S. I didn’t want anyone to miss my younger (by 21 months) sister’s comments, which she buried at the tail end of another post here. So I am going to copy and paste it for everyone here! Because it is just to good of a perspective.. and I agree with her!
Bethie……..
This brings back so many memories… as we grow older we realize just how well we really did have it compared to other kid’s families………. I think we were blessed…… Not many kids can say they learned how to ride a horse from the time they walked… and a bike…. What was that? I was 13 when I learned how to ride one and scared to death of the thing… but boy I could ride my crazy horse…… run down a dirt road as fast barefooted as you could w/ shoes on……… maybe faster………. 4-square in the middle of the road…….. All day long if we wanted too……. Drew our lines in the dirt w/ our feet……… those were the days……… not many people can say they can ride horse, milk cows by hand, split wood correctly….. As well as stack wood sturdy……. Oh the things we could do…… and didn’t understand the value of it until today. By the way……. I still can clean a mean barn but I am hell in the kitchen still……… and I don’t mind doing laundry either… I find it to be a pleasure (sounds kind of crazy, I know) but god, don’t leave me loose in the kitchen… send me to the barn….
FUAS
P.S. Remember the soda brownies?
***Please, nobody ask me to write about the soda brownies… 
Okay… I am sure I will eventually…. let’s just say… it was a cooking adventure….
<—-Remembering The Country (2)
Posted in Creative Writing, My Country Memories
