Growing Up in Williamsport, Ohio

​Wash Day
 
I don’t know what day my mother did laundry but I suppose it was Monday. It was an all-day event. On laundry day, we had bean soup for supper because there was no time or place on the stove to cook anything else.
 
Mama filled a large round tub with water and set it on our kitchen stove to heat. Remember that the water had to be carried inside from the cistern which was outside. Daddy may have helped get it in the house before he went to work. When he came home for lunch, they poured the heated water into the washer. The washer was situated in the dining room.
 
First, the washer agitated the dish towels, then everything else and lastly, my Dad’s work clothes. It was a wringer washer, so my mother had to run everything through the wringer. She used a cut off broomstick to pick the hot clothes up to put through the wringer.
 
After being washed, the clothes fell from the wringer down into another tub or bucket on the floor which was filled with cold water. The laundry was then rinsed and put through the wringer again. 
 
We had an outdoor wire clothesline behind the house. In the winter, my Dad’s clothes looked surreal blowing in the wind while frozen stiff. We had a clothes rack behind the Warm Morning Stove in the living room where everything ended up if they couldn’t be dried elsewhere.
 
We also had a clothesline that stretched the entire diagonal length of the dining room. When it rained, my mother hung the clothes there. Even today it depresses me to think of that because the clothes dripped on us while we ate. 
 
Sometimes it rains in our lives….even in the house.

©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020
Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck