Today I did a load of laundry, after stopping by Fresh Market for groceries this morning. I asked the cashier, Evi, who comes from the Philippines, for 3 dollars in quarters. The washer takes one dollar, and the dryer takes fifty cents, so I have enough change to do two loads. I used to spend an additional quarter on the dryer when I did my towels -- but now, with summer at last making a tardy appearance, I hang my wet towels out on my patio chairs and let the sun save me the spare change. I try to bring them back in after an hour, since the limp disconsolate things make my place look like a trailer park.
I can't tell you anything about my mother's laundry in the basement when I was a child. Like the kitchen, the laundry was OFF LIMITS to any and all small fry. She did it alone, and she did it well. I never lacked for clean underwear or socks, and my shirts were always ironed, while my brown corduroy slacks stayed as crisp as a head of iceberg lettuce in the produce section of the Red Owl. How that woman must have slaved, washing for five others, not counting herself. I didn't learn to appreciate how good I had it until I left home to join Ringling Brothers Circus at the tender age of 17.
There was nobody to do my undies for me then, I can tell you that. In company with other penurious First of Mays I saved up my spare change and asked the local yokels where the nearest laundromat was. Sometimes it was a block away. Sometimes several miles away. Most of the time I walked it, with my laundry sack slung over my shoulder like a sailor's duffel bag. I learned early on never to pour detergent into the washer, over my clothes, until I had deposited the coins and heard the water actually gurgling into the machine -- it's no fun pulling dirty, gooey clothes out of a washing machine that has decided to go on the fritz.
Good old Tim Holst, my bestest friend in clown alley, took his laundry economizing to an altogether higher level. He bought bars of Fels-Naptha laundry soap and used a cheese grater to flake a cup into his laundry. He figured he saved a dollar a week doing that, instead of investing in a box of Tide. I was never convinced that the grated soap ever completely dissolved -- his clown blouse and pants smelled and looked clean at the end of the cycle, but they seemed a little bit gummy to the touch.
As a missionary in Thailand for 2 glorious years, I had a maid, an actual, copper-bottomed MAID, who did my laundry for me -- in a galvanized wash tub out in the backyard, where she fought off an assortment of inquisitive frogs, lizards, beetles, and small inoffensive snakes that she took great pleasure in stamping into a pulp, Buddhist or no Buddhist. She barely had to hang the wet clothes up before the tropical sun fricasseed them to a crisp with the scent of boisterous orchids perfuming them. Boy howdy, did THAT make me feel like a millionaire.
When Amy and I bought our first house as a married couple, in Bottineau, North Dakota, there was no washer or dryer in the basement. Instead it was filled with an ancient rainwater cistern that left little room for anything else except a few wobbly wooden shelves for preserves and a sclerotic oil burning furnace. We made do with the local laundromat, until our first baby, Madelaine, came along. Then there were diapers to wash. Not for us those disposable thingies -- way back then they were outrageously expensive and none too reliable. They came unstuck in the car or in church, creating a smelly hullabaloo. And let me remind you, or inform you if you have never had the privilege of being a parent, that babies fill their diapers with substances that would put mustard gas to shame at alarmingly frequent intervals.
So we scanned the Classifieds for a cheap washer. And I mean CHEAP. We finally settled on a 1925 Maytag for $25.00. It was a large galvanized tub, with an electric motor underneath that turned a metal paddle inside the tub back and forth at a sluggish rate. Attached to the tub was an automatic mangle, run on a pulley from the same electric motor that powered the lethargic paddle. I had to manually pull each piece of laundry out of the tub and start it into the mangle. Out of the other side came clean clothes flattened into flatbread proportions. I got my fingers nipped a few times by that blasted mangle; that's when Amy first discovered I knew a few choice words I had picked up during my years with the circus.
I am not a spokesman for Maytag, but I gotta say that that old antique ran forever and never gave us any problems. Which was lucky, since getting dirty diapers clean in a contraption like that took several changes of water -- done with a garden hose. We never did get a dryer; we just hung everything out to dry, rain or shine. Defrosting a frozen flannel shirt on a sub-zero North Dakota morning will always separate the men from the boys.
Nowadays the laundry room in my senior apartment building is but a few steps from my front door. I feel no need to sit on the uncomfortable chairs the management provides to guard my duds (why is it laundromats have the most uncomfortable chairs in the world?) I can sit at my ease in my apartment, perusing my Kindle, until I hear the 'click' of the washer spinning to a halt or the 'clang' of the dryer ending its cycle, then stroll out my door and gather up my laundry. I devote a mere 2 hours to laundry each week. The rest of my time is taken up with growing chives on my patio and putting out cracked corn for the timid quail that like to come by, single file, right before the sun splits the mountains in half each morning.
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A friend of mine from Minnesota responded to this blog with his own memories, thus:
This prompts a number of memories. I remember Joanne telling me that one of the most appealing things about me was that I had a washer and a dryer. She had been living with the two girls–Crista would have been 6 and Amy would have been almost 4–in Wymount Terrace when we met, so she had to take her clothes to wherever in the complex the facilities were to be found.
Before I owned a house, I didn’t mind taking my clothes to a Laundromat because I really didn’t need to do it very often. Being a guy, I simply obtained enough underwear to fill up a large laundry bag and then I would make a trip. That worked out to about three weeks of underwear, which timed out perfectly because jeans and shirts only needed washing once every three weeks anyway, so it fit into a nice routine. Such a nice routine—developed over more that 20 years living on my own (perhaps that is why I remained unmarried for so long)—that I really couldn’t bear the thought of someone else touching my dirty clothes. That became (and has remained) a staunch policy our entire married lives.
The only episode where this policy was altered was when I was serving in Mountain Home on my mission. The area had a “mission mom” who baked us a fresh pie each week and did our laundry. I was perfectly OK with the pie, but very queasy about someone taking my clothes to wash them. Being the junior companion at the time, even though I was almost 10 years older than other missionaries in the mission, I kept my mouth shut.
Once I moved into a house, at age 40, I felt that I had truly moved up in the world with having laundry facilities in the basement. I no longer had to drive the half a block to the Laundromat just around the corner. I still kept to the once-every-three-week routine, however. Why change something that works?
I recall Jim, Joanne’s older brother, mentioning once that he put on a fresh, clean shirt every day. That boggled my mind, but then he lived in South Carolina, so the heat and humidity probably had something to do with it.
I had to look up what a mangle was, as I don’t think I’d ever heard the word before. I do remember, however, a scene in Babette’s Feast that showed frozen laundry hanging on lines outside the homes. Or maybe that was fish.
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