The picture of the James Washer in the Gaiam catalog reminds me how I washed the laundry at home in my old Cape Cod house on the mountain. The advertisements for the washer promise that you can launder as many as seven sheets at one time, but I know this assertion is a stretch. The washer held two full-size flannel sheets, or a few days of other laundry.
Wash day was a serious production that took hours and hours of intense work. First, the water had to be heated. I'd fire up the Glenwood Modern E wood-burning stove (I wrote about the stove earlier) and position the copper boiler over two burners of the stove to heat water to fill the washer. I'd fill the copper boiler with several buckets of water and transfer hot water to the washer, and then plunge the laundry into the water.
When the clothes were clean, I opened the spigot (you can see it under the machine) and drained the washer into the bucket, and dumped the bucket into the claw-foot bath tub. (The tub and the sink both drained into a stone-filled section of an old, barn cellar hole.) After the water was drained, I'd press the clothes through the hand-crank wringer and drop them into a big basket, refill the washer with clean water and rinse, dump water, wring clothes, and maybe rinse the clothes a second or third time.
Drying the clothes in the summer was never a problem. I had a line strung between two trees at the edge of the woods near the old house. In winter, when the snow could be four or five feet deep, I'd hang the clothes in the kitchen to dry. If I had washed sheets, I hung them from lines strung from the ceiling beams. If you have read Beatrice Potter's Miss Tiggywinkle, you will recall an illustration of that fine little hedgehog hanging up her wash to dry from the beams in the kitchen. That's what my drying regime looked like for sheets. For clothes, I opened up the wooden clothes horse and hung them to dry by the stove.
I came by a clothes horse in a friendly way. While I was working in the garden one fine summer day, a bicyclist stopped to say hello. Passers-by were rare, and a week might go by in the summer and I would see no one. In the winter, weeks and weeks might pass in the same manner. I invited the bicyclist inside for a glass of water, and the fellow told me that he had a little company in Maine that made wooden clothes horses. A few weeks later there was a knock at the door, and the bicyclist was there again; he had strapped a new clothes horse to his bicycle and had ridden up Stone Mountain to give me the gift. When I left the mountain, I brought the clothes horse with me.
Last year, I gave my little treasure to a neighbor, a young man, who drys his clothes outside on a clothesline in his city back yard. His line is strung between two trees. He used to have a clothes horse for winter drying, but it had fallen apart from use. I retrieved the rack from my basement and gave it to him. These things are meant for use, but I have grown accustomed to soft city life.
Nowadays I no longer have to set aside a half day exclusively for the washing.
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