Washday

"Wash Day"

I recently read an article about how to wash clothes.
Yes, I do know how it's done but this wasn't just about
throwing in a load of clothes, adding detergent, and pushing a button.
It was advice from years ago from a Grandmother to a new bride.
It went something like this:

How To Wash Clothes

1. Build a fire in the back yard
2. Fill a kettle with rain water from the rain barrel
3. Set up tubs so the smoke won't blow in your eyes
4. Shave one whole cake of soap in bilin' water
5. Sort into 3 piles: whites, colored, work britches, and rags
6. Make starch by stirring flour in cool water to smooth, thin with bilin' water
7. Take whites and rub dirty spots on washboard, scrub hard, then bile
8. Rub colored, don't bile, just rinch and starch
9. Take things out of kettle with broomstick handle, then rinch
10. Spread tea towels on grass, hang old rags on fence
11. Pour rinse water on flower bed
12. Scrub porch with hot soapy water
13. Turn tubs upside down
14. Go put on clean dress, smooth hair with combs, brew a cup of tea
15. Sit and rock a spell and count your blessings.

Maybe we should place a copy of this above our automatic washers
and read it when we get discouraged and count our blessings!

As I thought about it, my mind went back to when I was a little girl
and we had an electric Maytag wringer washing machine.
She was a white enameled beauty! I remember how glad Mom was
to have that washer.

I loved washday as a child because that meant I got to fingerprint.
Mom would cook up a batch of starch on the stove and then let it cool.
The starch was a lovely translucent blue and smelled much like
a fresh breeze after a spring rain. I would be given a piece of paper
and a little bowl of the starch. The creative juices would flow as
I made trees, houses, and little stick people with my gooey fingers.
The pictures would be put aside to dry and then I would be allowed
to help with whatever tasks Mama would give me according to
my age ability. I knew that I was surely grown up when Mama let me
run clothes through the wringer because using the wringer could be dangerous.
Sometimes accidents did occur because a child would climb up unnoticed
and get an arm in the wringer. Mama taught me early on to
hit the safety release if needed.

Another thing that we used along with the detergent, starch, and bleach
was something called bluing. Mama said it made the whites much whiter
and I remember how pretty it made the water. I always wanted to be the
one to add it to the water and watch the cloud of blue slowly permeate
the entire tub of water. I never quite understood how blue could make
things white but it did seem to help. Nobody wanted their white things to
look yellow or dingy. The ladies seemed to take great pride
in the whiteness of their whites.

By the time I was eleven years old, I could do most of the washing by myself,
and sometimes I would go down the road to Grandma's house and
help her do her washing. It was from her that I learned how to hang
clothes properly. You didn't just throw up a pillowcase and stick a clothespin in it.
At least that wasn't Grandma's way. She showed me how to hang them
so the breeze would blow inside of the pillowcases so they would dry more quickly.
And, you would just NEVER hang things all mixed up. For instance,
all the towels were hung in a row together, as well as rows of washcloths,
shirts, and so on. Grandma also showed me how to hang your unmentionables
inside of the sheets so they couldn't be seen if someone happened by the house.
Some of the clothes were heavy and we would prop up the lines with
old boards, with a notch cut out, created just for that purpose.
If there wasn't enough clothesline for the amount of laundry,
we had to take the dry things down and hang up more wet ones,
and sometimes we used the fence for extra space.

Monday really was usually designated as washday but the weather was really
the deciding factor. Ideally, Grandma liked to wash on a sunny day
when there was a good breeze. The winter was sometimes a different story,
when we brought in overalls frozen so stiff we could just stand them in a corner

until they thawed out and the house looked kind of spooky with clothes just standing around.

Although washday is much easier with an automatic machine,
I still like to hang clothes outside. I remember Grandma as I hang out the pillowcases.
They smell so fresh and look so nice flapping in the breeze.
I still follow the last item on that list…

I hang out the clothes, sit and rock a spell, and count my blessings.