Laundry Luxury

When I was newly married, I would write letters and cards to my grandma a lot.  I don't know where I got that idea as a selfish young adult, but I think mostly from church.  It was an approved Sunday activity and it breeded connection.  Also I remember having goals like that with my personal progress so it got me used to writing and mailing cards and letters.

As I was pouring in soap for the laundry this morning, I thought about the time I only had a washer and hung my stuff out to dry on our student housing balcony.  And before that it was carrying it to the laundry center for the student housing, using up quarters and sitting on the dusty floor waiting for the dryer that was never really finished.

When we made the big purchase of a washing machine at Sears it was a big day.   I think we did it because I got pregnant?  I know it was around that time.  Being pregnant was also the reason we moved out of those drafty cinder block walls and into a "real" 2 bedroom apartment downtown.  Which prompted a dryer purchase since it had hook ups.

Every step of my "laundry journey"I wrote up in one of the cards to my grandma.  She was dutiful about writing back and I got little snippets of stories about when they started homesteading and she washed the clothes, including cloth diapers in an irrigation ditch.  Those ditches were always brown as I remember, so there had to be discouragement in washing in dirty water.

I felt so tied to her as we told our stories back and forth.  I  miss her today and I am so thankful that whatever sense of duty it was that had us writing back and forth happened.  It was hard to get stories out of her, honestly.  She had a stoicism from a hard life and the tranquilizing medicine she took daily  when we saw each other at her home.

Back to here, I am in my clean home with my city water plumbed in, loving the luxury of washing my family's clothes.  Cleanliness is one of my obsessive focuses and being able to rest in the way I have things is great.  I hope my grandma in the 1940's can see the appreciation for her suffering that I have now.  Bless her.