My Life in the Little Brown House, part 19: Laundry

Washing clothes was a major, all-day operation and quite different from the washer and dryer operation of today. It was done on Mondays as I recall, and being a once-a-week operation entailed 8 to 10 “tubs” of wash in the washing machine. Normally the washing itself would be done by noon or shortly thereafter, ending up with using the water in the washing machine to wash down the floor of the laundry room, with the water going down the floor drain in the southwest corner of the room. Almost always the wash was hung outside to dry, even in the winter, I can vaguely recall my mother bringing in the clothes, stiff and frozen from being outside. Further drying may have been done on the clotheslines in the laundry area. The next steo in the process was to dampen or sprinkle the clothes and linen, rolling the pieces of laundry up and stacking them in the wicker baskets. After standing awhile or overnight, the laundry was ready for ironing, either late in the day or on Tuesday.

Washing clothes was such a major household task that often one of my mother’s sisters (either Aunt Ruth or Aunt Esther) would walk across town from Grandmother’s house to ours to spend the day helping my mother. Mostly I think it was Aunt Ruth was early in my days in the little brown house Aunt Esther was off working at the Deaconess Institute in Omaha. It was while she was working there that she suffered her mental breakdown and was institutionalized for awhile at the mental hospital at Cherokee. It was never clear to me the cause of her difficulty, but it may have been the kind of mental instability that I always thought characterized the Seashore side of the family (my grandmother’s side) plus the kind of standard of perfection in work and purpose that was engendered growing up in the Peterson household. So it was only after her return from Cherokee that she would have come to help.

It was on one of Aunt Esther’s visits (I suppose it was for helping with the wash) that for some reason or circumstance, she and I were having lunch together. We were having potatoes and gravy, with not much in the way of potatoes but considerable gravy. Aunt Esther said she would supplement her share of the potatoes with bread and gravy and I thought this peculiar indeed, never having encountered this before. I suppose that Aunt Esther had had bread and gravy in her childhood — perhaps potatoes were scarce in the household at times but there was always bread.