“It was brutal, all day and all hand washable. I’m not making this up.”

“It was brutal, all day and all hand washable. I’m not making this up.”

“Let’s get rid of these.” My daughter pointed to our washer and dryer. My first thought — how quickly can this be accomplished?

“Why do you want to get rid of them?”

“To save power. Just wet the clothes, squish them in a bucket and hang them on a clothesline. That’s how Ariel did it in ‘The Little Mermaid.’”

 “You can’t just wet the clothes,” I explained. “They need to be cleaned somehow.”

 She thought a moment. “I’ll ask Dr. Pamela.” Pamela Hall is our neighbor who evidently hangs her family’s clothes to dry. Seeing their whites blowing in the breeze so captured my daughter’s imagination, she was ready to go green with our laundry.

“Mama, all you need is soap.” 

Soap and a clothesline. Why didn’t I think of that?

 After doing research on the typical laundry regime of the early 1930’s for a project, I came to this conclusion: it was brutal, all day and all hand washable.

 The day often started at 5 a.m. building fires for water to boil in huge outdoor pots. The water had to be brought from somewhere…pump, stream.

No. It started before actual wash day, when mama first made soap by boiling grease, animal fat and lye. All these heavenly items were taken off the fire, cooled then poured out onto boards and cut into chunks. I’m not making this up.

 Then washday, clothes were boiled to loosen dirt, then washed in water with the pig fat soap, scrubbed on washboards ~ not abdominals mind you ~ wrung out and rinsed. Whites were then placed into a pot of bluing solution and then rinsed. After all this, the clean, wet laundry was hung outside to dry. It seemed like a whole bunch of work. Slave labor, actually.

Great. No more pity-parties about how horrible it is to do laundry, because compared to the way it used to be, there is nothing horrible about it. Honestly, it’s not the process I despise so much; it’s the colossal chunk of time it takes out of my week. A self-constructed prison cell, for if we didn’t own so many clothes to get dirty, laundry in the new millennium shouldn’t take nearly so long.

After explaining to my daughter the long, drawn out details of how laundry would be without machines, she was still up for giving it a try. Then I reminded her of how she had similarly enthused about taking the puppy on long walks.

Like most romantic notions, going 1930’s green with laundry is much better imagined than reality. I want to do my part for conservation, but color me chartreuse. With this issue, Mama is much more concerned with the conservation of her own dwindling energy and resources.