That's What She Said: A clean story about passion for laundry
- Dawn Dumont | February 25, 2015
I love doing laundry but trust me; this does not make me some kind of jolly, apple-cheeked hausfrau. Of all the household activities that one can attempt, laundry is the only activity I can do competently. Cleaning is beyond me: my apartment looks like the 1930’s Dust Bowl just rolled through, and the last time I made bannock my boyfriend actually asked a friend’s wife to come to my house and give me cooking lessons. To add insult to injury, she’s Ukrainian.
But laundry has some kind of magical hold on me – I love doing it and I’m kind of good at it.
My earliest laundry memories are of helping my mom carry out colourful plastic baskets of laundry into the backyard. Then she would plug in the white metal washer that sat in the middle of the backyard in a slight puddle from our last laundry session. In retrospect, this setup was pretty much a recipe for electrocution. Once certain death was evaded and the washer was turned on, it rocked our laundry back and forth while emitting a soothing smell of soap and yeast. Then after our clothes were boiled like potatoes and drained, mom would efficiently slide the clothing through the two rollers to get most of the water out. The rollers were ceramic and strong enough to turn coal into diamonds (too bad we were too poor to afford coal.)
About those rollers: if you grew up on a reserve, I’m sure you have at least one cousin who got a finger, wrist or other appendage stuck between them. My cousin Carla was the first one to sprain her arm. She claims she was helping her mom strain out the socks and that the machine just sucked her hand in as if it were possessed. We figured that Carla was full of shit about having a haunted washer, so our cousin Lorraine put her hand near the rollers and soon we had our proof in the form of Lorraine’s sprained wrist. What can I say? My cousins and I were very scientific thinkers.
Then after the laundry was no longer dripping wet but still damp, mom would carry it over to the clothesline. With the help of some very bitey clothes-pins, our laundry would wave in the Saskatchewan wind soaking up the flavours of fresh cut grass, wildflowers and sewer gas from the nearby septic tank.
When winter came, mom headed down to the valley with black plastic bags of laundry stuffed into our trunk and sometimes in the car competing for space with us five kids, if we’d waited a bit too long between laundry days. At the laundry-mat, we would claim the majority of the washing machines. People arriving after would give us dirty looks and we would shrug – what could we do? We were a big family and we got dirty – so sue us. When we ran out of quarters or soap, we knocked on the door of the laundry owners, a wraith-thin man and his just as bony wife. They never smiled (owning a laundry-mat is a dirty, cutthroat business, I suspect). They would wordlessly hand us what we needed and then close the door without even listening to our suggestions that they get better candy machines and maybe even an arcade game!
Laundry was a girl’s job but I didn’t mind because I enjoyed the work. However the feminist in me forced me to protest to my mom that our brother never helped (not sure what he was doing while we were all working, probably staring out the window wishing that he had a brother or that he was deaf.) My mom decided that wasn’t fair and so she made my brother do all the folding on one laundry day. My sisters and I ran around town for half an hour and bought as much stuff as a dollar can buy you (a surprising amount when you add it to the other five dollars that you stole from the laundry money.)
When we returned, we found our brother proudly standing in front of stacks of clothing. He’d folded everything neatly, even our bras, which we normally just stuffed in the laundry bag. There was something so creepifying about seeing our breast cups stuffed inside one another, the straps neatly curled inside of them, that he was never asked to help again.
Now I live inside a condo with in suite laundry and my love affair with laundry continues. There is nothing like pulling warm fresh-smelling clothing from the dryer – it really covers up the smell of burned food.
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