Laundry in the Wind

Laundry in the Wind

            Sometimes we need to air our dirty laundry out in the fresh clear air assuming that we have attempted to wash it beforehand.  Today was a day for washing various items of clothing as I prepared for a trip home.  Some of which I will not take with me but never-the-less it would be nice to have clean things to wear when I return.  Having said that I have been avoiding the issue of going home while going about my daily tasks particularly after the shock that was delivered to my attention the previous week? Has it been a week?

            Old memories flooded my mind, my heart and body when I found out that my younger sister was diagnosed with ALS.  She has had strange various things attacking her system for many years and looking back perhaps her body was trying to get her attention with its stop and go attitude.  Well, back to the laundry, after all, the title of this is Laundry in the Wind.

            I remember our mother washing and rinsing the laundry in the galvanized metal tub and electric tub washing machine with its rollers to squeeze out the water.   Our father had worked on carrying out the hot water from the house, water that had been heated on the stove to fill up the washing machine while our mother worked on sorting clothes and  lining up wooden clothes pin in a tin coffee can.   It was a very labor intensive job but when you have three children and a husband who works in a gas station which doubles as a garage for whatever isn’t working to come for a visit to be repaired then you have a lot of laundry.  Oh and there was ironing, lots and lots of ironing for back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, you ironed practically everything.  We helped by putting clothes on the lines and opening clothes pin to secure the clothes, sheets, towels and many other things that go into the laundry.   Air drying was at its best with the laundry flapping in the wind.  I enjoyed the flapping, the shadows casted on the ground and upon the other pieces of the clothes, linens and our father’s work overalls on the lines. Bugs, small flies and the fluff of dandelions would land on the drying pieces of our lives in the sunshine. Once dry, we would help shake the laundry to make it softer folding the small stuff. It was our part of helping. More often than not it was just laying on the grass with stomachs pressed on the ground making it a piece of heaven. 

            I wish I remembered more of those days and not just the laundry days but the hours that our mother spend in the kitchen cooking, canning and freezing food for her hungry children.  It seems to me that we were always hungry from running in the fields of alfalfa, tearing around on our bicycles, climbing trees, riding on the backs of black faced sheep in the pasture.  Why would we hang in the kitchen where our mother was working? She was forever.

So we would run in the house to grab something to eat and something to drink before we were back out the door with so many things to do.  Did we stop for a hug or a kiss?  Probably not, we knew where our mother was. Just like our dad, she was forever and always there until she was not.

Both of my young siblings and I had no understanding about what was beginning to happen to our mother when she started not to do things.  I was the oldest, I learned to bake, and cook from my mother.  I don’t remember much of it except the running back and forth from the hospital bed that lived in the front room with her in it.  The running back and forth was in order to learn what step to do next in the baking or cooking of something for supper.   

A current memory comes to mind of a young mother that I know that has cancer and is trying to do everything she can with her children while trying to remain optimistic about her next surgery.  Our mom was like that before the hospital bed. She drove her three children up a lonely dirt road at the head of the valley to a small natural warm springs and a small creek that she knew had been stocked with trout. We fished, she cooked and we slept in the Volkswagen van on a mattress that our father had placed on the floor.  In the night, a thunderstorm rolled in and I helped my mother pull in the edges of the mattress so we could close the doors of the van on the rain trying to come in. I don’t remember but I think that my brother and sister slept on. I fell back to sleep with the pattering of rain on the metal roof of our white Volkswagen.

 Funny, how memory fades, I don’t remember the name of the creek just the fishing with our wooden poles that our father had made us with fishing line tied to the ends. No reeling in of yards of line, you could just dip your line into the creek, let it float until a hungry fish grabbed at the ball of wriggling worm that had a fish hook threaded through its body. 

Guppies, we took jars with us to capture guppies to take home from the natural warm springs.  Easy to do as we played in the water with the little brown and sometimes rainbow colored fish nibbling gently at arms and legs, I have dreams about that place but it is very changed in the dreams with zillions of guppies everywhere just waiting for their capture.  

I drove home, twelve years old and I drove home with my mother helping me to change gears as she was able.  Exhaustion had set in and she was barely able to climb into the van.  She loved us and was squeezing all the life she could into whatever moments she had left. 

My younger sister told me this summer when she surprised me by coming to visit on the coast with her daughter, my niece, that our mother had ALS and not MS as we had thought.  My fleeting thought was, at least you are safe, no signs and you are older than she was when it struck her down. 

It seems we were wrong about you. That you, my younger sister might have escaped this disease and so I work on the laundry getting ready to come and see you with our mother’s face in mind.