Laundry Day at Grandma's

I think, if it were not for guilt, I would never get anything done. Like say...updating my blog. I have my gradmother to thank for the guilt complex. She was a master at it and wielded vast and well-planned guilt trips on even the youngest members of her family.

Speaking of Grandma. I've been thinking a lot about her lately especially since I'm about to finish up this year's writing class by having my students write their family history, or at least parts of it. Not wanting to be left out, I thought I would blog about one of my most vivid childhood memories. It involved Grandma and laundry.

Mondays were always the same at Grandma's house. That was one of the things I loved most about Grandma Ginny. She was as predicitable as the ten o'clock news. And Mondays, for time immemorable, had been laundry days at the white-sided house on the hill where Grandma, Grandpa, and their two youngest boys lived.

The morning started early, around sunrise give or take a few minutes. She would let me sleep until Sound Off aired on the AM station that constantly blared from behind a pile of empty cottage cheese containers in her cluttered kitchen. When I heard Gordy, the host of Sound Off, come on the radio I knew it was time to wake up. After downing a bowl of Total doused in sugar to make the cardboard flakes tolerable, we would go from room to room gathering up wayward socks, grass-stained baseball pants, Grandpa's sweaty old thread-bare undershirts, Grandma's polyester work pants, and countless pairs of underwear into an old wicker basket so frayed I was sure it would fall apart if she added one more dirty item to the pile. But, like the sandals that didn't wear out for forty years while the Israelites roamed the desert, that laundry basket endured throughout my entire childhood. If she had another laundry basket, I never saw it. It was, in my mind, almost miraculous.

After the laundry basket was full, we would trudge down the perilous, open-backed wooden stairs that led to the basement--an odd mix that included a well-worn pool table, my uncle's extensive beer can collection, a working fruit cellar, a toilet that I was terrified to use because it stood in the corner completely exposed to the rest of the basement, my Grandfather's tool room, and in the middle of it all sat three enormous, white enamel wash basins. Of course, she had an automatic washer and dryer, but they usually sat neglected in the shadow of the great enamel tubs. Grandma insisted they didn't get the laundry clean and avoided the new-fangled contraptions at all cost.

She would start by taking the hose from the wall and filling up the first tub. I would stare into the pooling water, anxious for the first tub to fill. Sometimes, Grandma would trust me to move the hose to the next tub. I hoped that today would be one of those times. As the water approached the ancient water line inscribed around the tub, I would timidly ask, "Grandma, I'll be careful can I move the hose?" With a nod, she would answer and I would carefully slip the hose from one basin to the other taking care to spill as little water as possible. Waste was a mortal sin in my Grandmother's eyes.

Once all three tubs were full, Grandma would pull the worn Ohio Wash Company washing board out from behind the first basin where she always kept it. To the untrained eye, Grandma's basement was an out right mess, but she knew where everything was down to the last tack. Then she would walk across the room and pull her secret weapon off the shelf--a candy box filled with homemade soap. With her cracked, red hands she would break off a chunk of the honey-colored soap and return the box to the shelf. The chunk was no bigger than a strawberry. Surely, I thought, that little bit wouldn't clean all of the dirty clothes moldering in the laundry basket.

First, Grandma would dump the entire basket of laundry into the soak tub. In my five year-old-mind, it seemed unseemly how Grandma's enormous brazziers and Grandpa's stretchy, old underwear would mingle together in the murky water. With a determined glint in her hazel eyes, Grandma would reach down for the first offender--one of Grandpa's greasy old undershirts-- yank it up with a snap, and slap it onto the rusted washboard. Then she would call for me to come hold the board, my least favorite part because it shimmed and moved so that I had trouble keeping it in one place. My Grandma would clutch the soap in one hand and plunge the garment deep into the water with the other. After she was satisfied that she had drowned a satisfactory number of germs, she would slide the shirt onto the board where it would get the real treatment. Methodically, almost angrily, she would slide that shirt up and down the ridges of the board paying special attention to the yellow sweat stains under the armpits. Her soap didn't lather much, but it was powerful. After about three minutes of intense scrubbing, slapping, sloshing, and examining, she would fling the shirt into the rinse basin and set her determined eye on the next victim in the soak tub. All morning long this went on, until it was time to wring out the laundry or if you are German like Grandma was, it sounded more like "wrenching."

This was the highlight of laundry day for me for I was the one who would stand on the other side of the wringer--two moving rollers that squeezed every last drop of moisture out of the clothes--and catch the flattened garments and place them into the wicker laundry basket. I must have been ten years old before I figured out that no one actually had to be standing there to catch the laundry--that gravity would have done its work just fine without me. None-the-less, I spent five years of grandious bliss, catching laundry and lovingly setting the distorted pieces into the miraculously resiliant laundry basket.

It was time now, to lug the basket outside and hang everything to dry on the clothesline. But, that's a story all of its own.