Kansas Snapshots by Gloria Freeland - October 4, 2024

Loving laundry

Family and friends emailed and texted me good wishes on my birthday and asked what I was doing to celebrate. I had to chuckle. Most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon was spent washing clothes and hanging them outside - and I enjoyed doing it! The day before, husband Art and I had arrived in his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, with sheets, towels, clothes, and other items that needed laundering from our Northwoods-cottage stay.

It was a beautiful sunny day, with temperatures in the low 80s and enough of a breeze to gently flap the clothes, yet not so strong as to tangle them.

Art inherited the home he grew up in after his brother Tommy died in January 2021. Tommy had moved in after their mother Donna, 99, passed in 2009. The washing machine and dryer in the basement still function, despite the dryer being purchased in the mid-1950s. But even with these modern conveniences, when the weather cooperated, Donna preferred to use the clotheslines in the back yard. Art says they have been there as long as he can remember and when they were briefly taken down while his dad re-sided the house, Donna prodded him to reinstall them.

I feel much the way Donna did about drying, and hanging our clothes outside brought back memories of when siblings Dave and Gaila and I helped our mom with that chore on our Marion County, Kansas farm.

"I helped mom hang clothes a lot," Dave said. "And I remember the old washing machine on the porch. Didn't mom have to heat up water for that on the stove? I believe we had two lines that hung south of the cooling shed where dad separated the milk/cream and put in ice cold water from the windmill."

Gaila recalled the old wringer-washer and how mom's hand got caught in it one time. She reminisced about wiping the lines down "because birds would always poop on them!"

Dave's companion Marilyn said she and her sister put blankets over their clothesline to make a play area and they stuffed the end-pole openings with rags to discourage wasps from building nests in them. Gaila and I did something similar, throwing sheets over the lines and pretending we were under a tent.

Friend Deb said she helped her mother and grandmother with the laundry.

Mom had a bag for clothespins that slid along the wire. We would be warned not to run around the clothes, but the minute she went inside, we naturally ran between the flapping clothes ... sheets were fun. The crisp fresh smell sleeping on the sheets was yummy ... When storms were predicted, Grandma would yell for us to help her strip the lines down to beat the rain and would spread the clothes out indoors to dry. ...

Friend Bryce remembered coming in from doing chores on a late-fall or winter evening and his mom asking him and his brothers to bring in the last clothes from the clothesline. "They were often frozen and she put them on the wooden rack in the dining room over the only furnace grate in the floor."

Even though Art is from Wisconsin, he says he never adjusted to the cool weather in Scotland. During a May visit to Dufftown in 1983, he awoke at 5 a.m. and looked out of the bed-and-breakfast's window. He was greeted to the sight of four full lines of frozen clothing. Each piece swung in the brisk breeze, more like planks of wood than something made of cloth.

Reader Paula recalled a similar experience in Connecticut.

... The winter was the worst as the clothes held their frozen shapes and [it was] hard to tell if they were dry or not. The fresh smell of clothes dried outside was so much better than the ones dried in a dryer. My grandmother's clothesline was out the kitchen window. It was attached to the house, maybe 15 feet above ground ... and attached to a pole. It was on a pulley - easy to put out and bring in. They didn't need to go out in the cold weather. ...

Her pulley comment brought to mind a similar system my apartment had in San José, Costa Rica. The back was up against a steep hill, so the clothes were hung out and taken in through a window using a cord-and-pulley arrangement. During the rainy season, I put clothes out in the morning and took them in at noon before the afternoon and evening downpours.

Bryce mentioned a laundry incident that really upset his mother.

Mom had a nice new white tablecloth for special occasions and hung it on the line to dry, and our billy goat ate a big corner of it. Mom was so upset and cried. One didn't just run out and buy another in those days. The billy goat was a mean and smelly goat, and his life was cut short in response to that. ...

He also remembered his grandmother Edith's advice on washing. With six boys, three girls, and a husband, all wearing overalls, she said to turn them inside out and fluff out the pockets before washing them. That way, they would dry better. Her tip even made it into an April 1991 New Yorker article about old-time-radio call-in shows.

Tales like these soon caused me to be "waxing poetic" about "the good old days." However, Deb brought me back to reality.

... Laundry sure was a time-consuming activity compared to modern times of throwing into a machine and pushing a button. And line drying them meant ironing 'cause of massive wrinkles ... most fabrics were cotton. More time [was spent] using cork-topped bottles of water to wet the wrinkles and then hot iron.

Ah, yes, I remember all that extra work - hours of sprinkling the clean clothes, then rolling them up and putting them in a bag, and then pulling them out, one by one, to iron them!

Sometimes those good old days are better to remember than relive!