Laundry Day
“Because it’s laundry day”, might have been my mother’s answer to the Boomtown Rats’ lyrics, “Tell me why I don’t like Mondays”. What was there to like about washing clothes in a wringer-washer? When it came to laundering bed linens her face expressed intensity, not joy or anger, just intensity. I sensed it was something she tolerated, something that just had to be done, something that she appreciated a hand with.
I sometimes helped my mother maneuver hoses from the basement water taps to fill her washing machine and two galvanized metal rinse tubs. After fifteen minutes in sudsy water swished around by a clunking agitator, my mother wrestled the sheets out of the washtub into the mouth of the wringer frantically untwisting, straightening and flattening them to prevent jamming the rollers. I stood guard at the back end of the wringer catching, guiding and dunking the sheets into the first rinse tub. My mother firmly believed that dermabrasion was not what sheets were intended for, so for softer sheets, a second rinse to remove the last traces of detergent was her mantra. She swung the wringer around ninety degrees, and we started again from the first rinse tub to the second. Swiveling the wringer around another ninety degrees, we moved on to round three from the final rinse into an awaiting laundry basket.
In the winter months, seemingly more than half the year in Winnipeg, she hung her laundry indoors on clotheslines suspended from the overhead joists spanning the basement. My sister and I chased each other around the maze created by the hanging sheets. My mother grimaced at the thought that we could accidentally pull them down but let us play anyway.
Between the spring thaw and autumn freeze, laundry dried outdoors. Even though hanging sheets might freeze flat in a morning chill, they eventually thawed, dried and absorbed the smell of the sun and breeze. Two lines stretched about seventy feet between a post around the corner from the rear entrance of our house to another at the end of the yard. Half the length of the line traversed a patch of lawn and the second half my father’s plot of vegetables. Summer also meant war against the ravenous swarms of Manitoba mosquitos. The pests could make summer evenings unbearable.
My father had somehow subscribed to the myth that the purple martin’s diet consists mainly of mosquitos. Attempting to eradicate them from the yard, he topped the post at the far end of the clothesline with a five-star purple martin resort hoping to fill it with nesting pairs. It stood uninhabited for years until one spring when a colony discovered it and booked all eight suites for the season. The arrival of purple martins elated my father but later left him disappointed when he realized that they don’t really feast on mosquitoes.
One mid-summer day, from the platform at the corner of the house, my mother pinned, sent out and reeled in load after load. As the sheets shuttled their way to the post at the far end of the garden, it was my job to keep watch on the line sagging with the weight of the wet sheets to make sure nothing touched the taller vegetables. All was clear below, but from above, I saw a squadron of kamikaze martins jettison their load before landing on their perches. My father’s beloved birds had splattered poo-poo polka dots on my mother’s clean white sheets. The clothesline stopped, shifted into reverse and reeled back in as my mother spat never-before heard fiery curses that rivaled my father’s flames on his best day.
The next Monday, my mother’s laundry routine went off without a hitch, she used her new dryer.