Those Good Old Days...

NOT!!

Any of you people that think they would like to go back to the good old days better think twice or three times.  At least in the part of automatic washers.  I actually remember my grandma washing clothes in her wringer washer.  Thought it was the neatest thing, too.  I wish I had one of those right now.  But, if it was broken like my nice 2 year old front loader is now, it wouldn't do me any good.  I wish I had anything right now that would wash clothes right in my house, besides me.

Now, I have been keeping up on my laundry, so we have clothes to wear for a few days, in any case.  I don't let everything get all dirty at once, since everyone has different amounts of underwear anyway and it wouldn't come out even.  That is all well and good, except in the case of needing to wash de-tasseling clothes every day no matter what.  Even if my 15 year old daughter had a spare set, it would mean needing to wash every OTHER day, and my washer broke Friday, after any possibility of calling a repairman, with the very muddy de-tasseling clothes and very muddy Jim's jeans in it, which means no way of washing for at least three days, and longer if parts have to be ordered.

When I went down to check on my machine that fateful afternoon, it was humming away with the electronic board off.  Hmmm, funny, so I opened the door and let a flood of VERY muddy water onto the laundry room floor.  (It didn't drain any water at all.) I had company, (just my dad, thank goodness), so, I screeched and hollered, and dropped towels, and yelled at Lynette to get her dad.  (Who decided he could finish the front yard mowing before he came in.-- It wasn't that bad, :)  He had one more round.) So, we drained the water out of through the external drain, mopped the floor, listened to the machine, and pronounced it "very sick, call the repairman on Monday".  Ugh, Lynette did find an extra set of clothes to wear de-tasseling, and in doing so, found these were cooler, and she doesn't want to wear anything else in these 100 degree days of walking in middy, humid cornfields.  So, I took a trip to the laundromat.  Do they even call them that anymore?  I haven't been in one for about 10 years. And they don't take money, they take tokens.  And you have to remember to bring your soap, and you have to read this whole thing on the front to figure out how to work it.  It took me longer to go to Walgreen's and buy the soap I forgot, haul the laundry into the building and read the instructions, than it did to wash the clothes!!. I tried not to think how I must look fumbling around the machines with about 20 college students in there, merrily chatting as they folded and sorted clothes. I got done however, with leftover tokens.No exact amounts here, you have to put dollars into the token machine, and the washers are not even dollars. It costs $1.75 to wash a load the size of three towels, and $2.75 to wash in the machine the approximates the size of a normal family washer.  Thankfully, I remembered in time that my dryer still worked at home.

That gets me all down to what happened this evening.  I was faced with a set of muddy clothes to wash with  no washer.  It's either scavenge up the money and go to the laundromat, or wash them out at home.  I didn't want to go anywhere.  It's hot out there; I'm too tired to drive; I will probably have to go tomorrow anyway.  I put those clothes into soapy water in the bathtub and started agitating them around with a wooden spoon.  It looked like I was making mud soup.  You should see the state of my bathtub!!  Then it is rinsing time.  It takes a lot of water to rinse out a pair of Zumba pants, a button down shirt, a tank top, shorts, underwear, and socks, until the water is reasonably clean, considering how dirty the things are going to get tomorrow.  Washing clothes by hand might be 'green' in the sense of not using electricity, but it sure isn't 'green' in how much water I used.  Now I know why the pioneers didn't have very many clothes.

The clothes are now tumbling in the dryer, ready to be worn and washed again tomorrow.  All you people out there with working automatic washing machines had better be REALLY thankful, that's all I can say.