This is the Way We Wash The Clothes

 March 2006

Oh, the virtue of it all. The laundry is washed, dried, folded, and put away. I'm free from that drudgery for a few days until it piles up again. But at least, I have a washer and a dryer. I'm grateful for them! 

We bought our first washer and dryer shortly before Keely was born. A fellow who was moving sold us the set cheap. It was apartment-sized --the washer hooked up to the sink faucet, and both the washer and the dryer could be plugged into ordinary wall outlets. It was wonderful not to have to drag the laundry to the laundromat anymore.

Then we went to Germany for five years and our washer and dryer went into storage. When we came to Kentucky, the little washer refused to wake from its long hibernation. It wasn't worth fixing, so we went to Sears and bought a Kenmore washing machine which served us faithfully for 15 years with only a couple of visits by the repairman. 

Though its mate died, the apartment-sized dryer still worked when we came back to Kentucky. We used it for about a year, until one day I put too much heavy wet clothing into it and burned up its motor and the wall outlet it was plugged into. 

I had already rigged a clothesline between a couple of trees, so I dried the laundry outside for the next five years. Money was tight and a dryer wasn't an absolute necessity. I soon became well acquainted with the joys and frustrations of depending on a clothesline.

Clothing dried outside usually has a wonderful fresh-air scent. However, there were times when our neighbor spread manure in his field, and any clothing hung out to dry picked up the stench. And while laundry dried quickly on a warm, breezy day, it didn't dry at all in rainy weather.

Hanging the clothes was a pleasant outdoor diversion on a warm day, but on a winter day, even with gloves, my hands ached with cold before a full basket of wet laundry was pinned to the line. 

Dennis decided that the clothesline between the trees looked tacky, so he fixed a proper clothesline with metal poles, on the south side of the house where the north wind wouldn't be so bitter in cold weather. That turned out to be a bad idea. We have a wood stove that we use in the winter, and in the clothesline's new location, the laundry picked up a strong smoke smell all winter.

We eventually got a dryer (a Kenmore.) I'm grateful for it, but I still hang clothing outside sometimes when the weather is nice. I don't have a clothesline anymore, but I do have a chain that I use for clothing on hangers -- one hanger per link in the chain. The hangers can't slide together and the wind can't blow them off the chain. If I put the clothing on hangers as soon as the washer stops, most of it dries nearly as wrinkle-free as if it had gone through the dryer. 

My Mennonite neighbor, Kathryn, is dedicated to hanging her laundry outside on the clothesline year-round, though she has a dryer for emergencies and long rainy spells. Her clothesline is a long loop strung around a pulley on each end. One pulley is on the porch and the other is mounted high on a tall pole far across the yard. She stands on her porch to pin on the clothes, then pulls the line through the pulleys to move the clothing out into the air high above the yard.

Last year, the Kenmore washer started having some problems and we decided to get a new washer. I researched washing machines in the $500 range, and finally decided on a General Electric with a stainless steel basket. I am satisfied with it; my only complaint is that it is noisier than the Kenmore. 

My conclusions about all this? A washer and a clothesline are better than going to the laundromat, and a washer, a dryer and a clothesline are as good as doing your own laundry can be. But a laundry maid would be the best of all.

Ink Bottles and Fountain Pens

 

I attended Duff Valley District 4 in Rock County, Nebraska in the late 50s and early 60s. It was a one-room elementary school with a pitcher pump, a flagpole, a swing set, outhouses, an old barn from the days when the students rode horses to school, and of course, the schoolhouse itself.

The desks in our schoolhouse were old enough that most of them had inkwells built into the upper right corner of the desk top. An inkwell is a cup that holds a bottle of ink and keep it from spilling while a writer is using it. 

Ball point pens had been invented by then, but writing with real ink wasn't  completely obsolete. Stores still sold little bottles of ink and the necessary ink pens. One variety of pen had an inner rubber bladder that held a supply of ink.  This was an innovation that allowed the pen to write for a while before it needed refilling.  The user filled the bladder by dunking the pen in the ink bottle and operating a little lever on the side of the pen. The filling procedure made a small interesting gurgle. 

I was never able to keep my hands clean while messing around with an ink bottle and pen. Sometimes there were spills. I made a big black ink mess on a page in my Social Studies book during my ownership of one manually loaded ink pen. I accomplished this behind the privacy shield of my raised desk lid because my teacher had already told me to stop playing with my pen and ink. 

I enjoyed fountain pens, too. A fountain pen got its ink from a plastic cartridge that was a little smaller in size than a triple-A battery. An ink cartridge was installed by pressing the pointed top end of the pen's nib into one end of it and loading the cartridge-with-nib into the body of the pen. 

The ink cartridges almost always leaked at the puncture point. The ink oozed onto the grip of the pen, and soon my writing fingers had black, red, blue, or green stains, depending on the color of ink in the cartridge.  

If I accidentally let the pen rest against the paper when I wasn't writing, an ink spot quickly developed. If I shook the pen, little drops of ink flew from it.  If I thoughtlessly rested my hand or arm on the wet ink, it smeared, and if I folded the paper before the ink was dry, it made mirror images of any wet letters. These things happened with both types of ink pens.

We students made plenty of messes with ink, but Duff Valley's teachers had a long history of ink accidents that they couldn't deny. The bottoms of the wooden drawers in the teacher's desk had dozens of blots and stains from decades of leaky ink pens and tipped-over ink bottles. 

Isaac's Strep Dream

March 2006

Isaac was home from school yesterday because he has strep throat. Last night in his medicated and somewhat feverish condition, he had a nightmare. In his dream, he had invited his friends to a party in our yard, and a crowd was gathering. 

Meanwhile, everything inside the house was terribly wrong. Dennis was sitting at the table in his underwear drinking beer. Keely and I were dressed in the ragged old clothes that we save for painting. The house was a total wreck, nothing was ready for the party, and no one but Isaac seemed to care. 

People were showing up that I had invited without consulting Isaac, and they were people he didn't like. He didn't even know some of the people I had invited, including the goth-looking teenage couple we saw at the library yesterday afternoon (in real life.) 

Isaac was frantically trying to fix everything, but there were too many things that were very badly wrong and he knew he was going to be terribly, terribly embarrassed at any moment when his friends came inside.

 The classic nightmare with the "Darn, I forgot to wear my clothes!" moment seems almost mild compared to the kind of humiliation that the family was inflicting on Isaac in this dream.

I have wild dreams at times, but I rarely remember them long enough to tell anyone about them or even think about them. But Dennis, Keely, and Isaac dream vividly and often entertain me with the curious plots their minds create.