Friday Flashback

I've been outside twice already this morning (it's 7:15) to put laundry out on the clothesline. The sun decided to actually make an appearance this morning and I figured I'd take advantage before it changed its mind. The first load out was the one that finished about 6:00 - I loaded up the machine last night and set the timer to start about 4:30. Magical - a load of laundry done before I get up that hasn't sat overnight, and so doesn't smell like fromage des chausettes.

My mother doesn't have the miracle of a washer with a timer. She doesn't have an automatic washer at all. For many years, not so many years ago (maybe 30), laundry started early, boiling pans of water on the stove to fill the wringer washer. The whites went first, in that super hot water, then towels, then a load of jeans. By that third load, the water was most definitely not hot, and not so clean either, so the washer got drained, refilled. Lights, darks, more jeans. Jeans always went third because they were dirtiest, the dye bled, and needed the coolest water. If there were running shoes or throw rugs that needed washing, they went after the jeans.

Sometime in the mid-late 70s dad tore off the back kitchen (what had been the kitchen before he built a new one) and constructed a new addition, complete with laundry room. The rest of the western world might have boarded the automatic washer train many stations earlier, but not my mother. What had probably begun as poverty driven frugality became a bit of convenience-shunning martyrdom. Don't get me wrong, I love my mother, but when you're doing wash for seven and have a new laundry room (with running, heated water!) why step up from the wringer washer to this? "With an automatic, YOU don't do the wash, the machine does." And that's a bad thing?! My mother's new washer, to go with her new space was just the teeniest, tiniest step up from the wringer. You still had to remove the clothes from the washer tub, move them to the spinner, then soak them in the laundry sinks to rinse (spinning, of course, between rinses.)

Now, to be fair, I also have one of these Danby machines. My washer broke a few years ago and having 3 kids and a husband with OCD (with contamination issues), not doing laundry was out of the question. Until I got the broken machine replaced, the Danby machine was enough. It was relatively inexpensive, it did the job, but like mom said, it was ME doing the wash, not the machine. There is no diminished glory, for me anyway, in having a working, automatic, fancy-with-a-timer washer.

Now if you'll excuse me, load #3 is ready to go on the clothesline.