I hate laundry. There are a lot of daily routine type tasks that I dislike, but laundry probably tops the list.
I haven't always been a laundry hater. When I was little, I wanted to be a grown up, and thus, I was always trying to do whatever my mom did. When she decreed it was laundry day, naturally, I wanted to help, which actually means get in the way and create more work, but I was in there trying.
When I was young, which, in this case, means before high school, we had a washing machine that looked something like a medieval torture device. It worked like one, too, if you were cavalier about using it. It was called a wringer washer, a simple but effective tool, but not one to be taken lightly.
It would swish the clothes around in the main chamber, like a present day washing machine, but it didn't spin them. Instead, you got the water out of the clothes by feeding them through the wringer [pay attention, this is important information here] With A Long Stick.
The wringer itself hung on a movable arm above the water chamber so you could swing it around as you needed to rinse. As the soapy water was squeezed out of the clothing it would go back into the machine to be reused, so it was a water saving device, which would please the green advocates, and of course, my thrifty mother. Then, to finish the process, you would have two tubs of clear water next to the washer, where you put the clothes to rinse, wringing them out between tubs in turn, so by the end, they were clean, rinsed, and ready to dry.
On a side note, since you reused the water for each load, it was crucial that you do the loads in the right order, so as not to bleed darker colors into lighter clothes. To this day, I am all but incapable of doing my laundry in any other order, lightest to darkest, because it just feels wrong.
Anyway, the oldest wringer washers had a crank that you turned by hand to make the rollers come together and squeeze the clothes. However, my mother had the upgraded, newfangled electric version. More efficient, it's true, but also a little problematic, because sometimes you would get too many layers in there and it would jam. Or occasionally the wringer would pull the stick in with the clothes and get stuck. [You can see where this one is going now, I'll bet.] There was a release, and you would pull and yank to get the piece of clothing back out, so you could start wringing the daylights out of them again.
Not a terrible system, but not one without its risks.
My aunt and uncle were visiting with my cousins, Ahna, a couple of years younger than me, and Becky, who was a baby at the time. Back then, babies were not Huggied up and Pampered the way they are today.
Not to get off track here, but I must say, having been a mother, it's a lot cooler to "choose" cloth diapers when you have the alternative of disposable, or at least a laundry service that takes away the nasty ones and delivers fresh, sweet smelling clean ones every couple of days. It wouldn't make it worth it to me, I have to be honest, but at least you could feel self-righteous about it if you went that way. Save the trees and all that. I'm for it. As long as I'm not in it. But back then, in the dark ages of the 1960's, disposables were not mainstream, and cloth diapers weren't a lifestyle choice. That was just the Way Things Were.
So anyway, all this meant that every few days you would take that full pail of rinsed out diapers and wash them, then hang them out to dry on the line. As in clothesline, where they dry in the open air, and you get the real April Fresh smell instead of the kind in the bottle. You also got fly specks and the occasional bird offering, but they smelled really good.
So, my aunt, whom I very fondly still call by her childhood nickname Tootsie, although her real name is Alice, not surprisingly needed to wash diapers. I have no idea where Becky was, but Ahna and I decided that we absolutely had to help. I am certain my aunt was thrilled with the additional burden of having to keep an eye on us while doing what was already an odious chore, but she took it with good humor, and down to the basement we traipsed.
Ahna and I naturally wanted to "do" the wringer, since it was fun to see the water squeeze out of the clothing. I was feeding the machine from one side, while Ahna was pulling the clothes out on the other and moving them to the rinse tub. I am certain my aunt warned me repeatedly to use the stick to feed the clothes into the machine, and I am equally certain that the moment she turned her back on me I stopped using the stick, because it was harder to get the clothes into the wringer that way. Obviously, the next thing I knew, the washer was eating my fingers.
I stood there, sort of dazed, watching my now excruciatingly painful digits disappear into the jaws of the clothes shark, unable to do anything for a split second. But then I came to my senses and yelled. And Ahna yelled. Which meant my aunt, who I'm sure required a moment to size up the difficulty, probably yelled, too. I'm reasonably sure I screamed bloody murder, which is what my fingers looked like when that machine was done with them.
Fortunately, I had little fingers and my aunt was really quick. You have no idea how fast an adult can move until you have done something stupid, requiring them to rescue you. Tootsie got the machine stopped, hit the release, which as I recall naturally jammed, what with the thick load it was clenching, and finally removed my very sore fingers from between the rollers.
It was sort of interesting what happened over the next couple of weeks, as I lost three fingernails, one after another. No broken fingers, but a lot of pain and bruises, and everybody feeling bad because I was stupid. Oh for dumb.
But that's being a kid. Kids are dumb. They are constantly doing stupid stuff you have told them moments before not to do, just to see what happens. Every kid has their hand on the burner moment, where you KNOW, you have been told a million times, not to do something, but you just cannot help yourself, because it's so tempting.
Sometimes though, it's just not your fault. We grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota. Have I ever mentioned that Minnesota is obviously paradise, God's country for Lutherans? I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm Lutheran, if you didn't know, which means I am saved by God's grace, which is a really lucky thing, because you know the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I am always well intentioned. Anyhow, one thing about growing up on a farm is that you must do for yourself, because you have no money, and there's no one else to do it, anyway. Farm folk are resourceful. Being poor forces you to be resourceful, of course, but that doesn't mean it's not still a virtue.
Anyway, my brother and I were repairing the roof of this little building that sits next to the barn, which was very rotted and dangerous. My brother, being the kind of guy he is, warned me to follow him across the roof, exactly in his footsteps, so that he could test each step and make sure it was safe for both of us to walk across there. [See, I told you he was a great guy, sacrificing himself for me and all.]
I was an unhappy helper to begin with, because I would rather have been sitting in a tree reading a book, but I had been enlisted and he was a lot bigger than me, so I wasn't going to argue about it. There I was, trudging across this stupid roof, when suddenly, the floor dropped out from under me.
It knocked the wind out of me, so I couldn't yell, but he probably heard the crack as I dropped and landed with my back wedged against a 2X6, looking for all the world like a talking head. I would have laughed at the startled look on his face if only I could have caught my breath. He turned around and I wasn't there, and then I watched as his eyes, filled with disbelief, slowly dropped and located me around his ankles, gasping and pretty unhappy to be there.
As I believe I have mentioned before, my brother likes to get all the information before making a plan in any situation, so as I'm hanging there, he asked the obvious question. "What are you doing?" If I hadn't been in pain, I probably would have told him I was just hanging around, but I don't think I was in the mood. When we determined I could move, he lifted me out of there, and my long suffering mother took me to the emergency room or the doctor or somewhere. I know there were X-rays, and my back was injured, something was cracked, and they fitted me up with this elastic brace that I wore for awhile, until things were back to normal.
There is no moral to that story. Every story doesn't have to have a moral to be amusing. Sometimes it's just fun to muse.
One of my favorite lines is, "Well, you can do it, I guess, but don't come crying to me when it doesn't work out." I say this to my kids whenever they insist on doing something which I have already told them is going to be a mistake. Sort of like "I told you so" in advance. That way, you don't have to say it when it happens, which would just make you look smug. Instead, you get to look prescient. [Obviously, if it does work out, then it all just goes away, and you don't bring it up again.] Kind of win/win for moms.
Of course, any time you have a win/win situation, you know there has to be a lose/lose as well. In this case, it means you didn't know what dumb thing they were going to do, so you couldn't tell them in advance not to do it. However, and this is the important part, you would have known it was an asinine thing to do, and would have warned them against it, if only you had been given the opening. This means you lose, because you don't even get to say I told you so, even though you would have, if only you had known.
One time, my son's friend came over to borrow Adam's kite. Andrew was often a little scatter brained, and he lost everything, all the time. Naturally, when Adam went looking for him a short time later, he found Andrew standing in the empty field, roll of string still in his hand, with the end of the line fluttering on the ground, and no kite in sight. Adam asked him where the kite was, to which Andrew replied that it got away. When Adam observed that Andrew was not very bright to have allowed this situation to occur, Andrew's response was, "Well, you know how I am. You shouldn't have let me borrow it in the first place."
Well, at least he didn't come crying to me.
