CA Update - Susan Dlugach

Susan Dlugach was a reporter for the Las Vegas Daily Optic in New Mexico before turning to a career teaching English in New Mexico and California. These days she spends her time folk dancing, doing yoga, and dreaming up stories.

Wash Day Musings

Sunday is laundry day for me, and I’m thinking about my mother and other mothers before me. My washing work begins by dumping all the dirty clothes and such on the floor. I sort dark from light, which sounds rather biblical. Some say cleaning is a godly act. The socks and underwear go in small netted laundry bags that close so the little pieces stay together in the washing machine instead of getting swallowed and maybe eaten, never to be seen again. I add detergent and borax to the load, then push a button that commands the machine to wash.

Why do people pay others to do such a simple job when the machine does most of the work?

I remember my young mama on her knees bent over the bathtub rubbing the sheets and shirts and pants on a scrub board. Then she had to rinse the sudsy water out of all that laundry and hand-wring each piece before tossing it into a basket, which she took outside to pin up on clotheslines.

I also remember being afraid of the dark, so I peed in the bed instead of stumbling bravely to the bathroom. More laundry for Mama and the scrub board.

But what about getting laundry done when it rained? After all, there seemed to be more cloudy days than sunny ones on the Gulf coast. Maybe the pile of dirty clothes just grew mountain high until the skies cleared.

When my washing machine finishes its cycle, I toss some of the items into the dryer and choose lighter pieces, delicate ones and things I don’t worry about wrinkling to hang outside. It’s sunny most of the time in Sacramento, seldom humid, so clothes practically flash dry.

Laundry is a task I do, but for mama and our ancestors, it was work.

My grandmother’s wringer washing machine was fun, like a toy. At least I thought so as I watched her roll each piece through two cylinders that squeezed out the water, pressing the pieces flatter than pancakes. Sometimes she let me roll a few through the machine. Then she hauled the basket out to the yard, took out a rag and wiped the clotheslines down before hanging out the freshly washed clothes. No bird poop or bugs getting pinned in her washing!

Back in Russia where my bubbie grew up, an area now called Belarus, her laundry must have been washed along the river. In late spring or summer or early autumn when the ice was gone, the women must have soaked the dirty pieces in the chilled waters of the Bug or the Dnieper or the Pripyat River, or one of their tributaries. They then sudsed them with soap made of lye, and slapped them on rocks or used wooden paddles to beat them. Today’s machines agitate the laundry for us, but our grandmothers far back didn’t need to go to the gym to tone their arms.

The wash would then be rinsed in the river, wrung out and placed on rocks or on grass or hung out on lines to dry in the sun.

But winters in the Pale of Settlement were long and bitter. Maybe my bubbie and her family’s clothes were quite grubby and smelled rather strong before pitching them aside for cleaning. Laundry was surely a more laborious task because it often involved soaking overnight, then scrubbing on a washboard using soap and hot water heated over some sort of fire. Maybe the washing was boiled in a large pot to sanitize it.

In rural areas near frozen rivers, a hole was cut into the ice, and screens were set for wind protection. Women would swish the pieces in the river water, which was warmer than the air since, under the ice, it was, well, not frozen.

Once rinsed, the laundry would be hung on lines, each piece freezing solid as a popsicle. The moisture would sublimate in the freezing air, that is to say turn from ice into vapor. Next the frozen pieces would be hung on racks or on furniture inside near a stove or fireplace to thaw and finish drying.

Obviously I wasn’t around in the 19th or early 20th centuries while my bubbie was growing up, and she never talked to me about laundry, so imagining the work of washing clothes when she was young in the old country has been aided by the internet. It’s another one of those things I never thought to ask her about those times I spent with her while devouring strudel or warm braided challah fresh from the oven.

~ Susan Dlugach