Mondays With My Mother

Memoir Contest Third Prize

by Mary McIntosh

As the train sped through the town outside of Seattle, I looked out of the window and noticed a row of small houses nestled together. On this sunny day, I caught sight of a woman busily hanging her wash out on the line. My eyes filled, for it brought back such lovely memories of when I helped my mother with the laundry.

Mother was an excellent housekeeper, and a great cook. She was not fanatic about it, but wherever we lived she always managed to change a house into a home.

She scrubbed and dusted, polished and waxed, and took pride in what she did. Often my father would tease her if he saw a cobweb in a corner, knowing that Mother might have swept there just a few hours earlier. Spiders were well known for spinning their web right after she had cleaned. She also enjoyed cooking for the five of us, and each day baked bread or pies, cakes or cookies.

But her real joy was doing the laundry.

This always seemed strange to me, for at least when she baked or sewed she was an artist and being creative, whereas the laundry was the same thing over and over. Each Monday she would lovingly wash my father's socks and shirts, my dresses, my brother's underpants, bath towels, dish towels and sheets in her new electric wringer washing machine.

I wondered why she enjoyed this task so much, and then I remembered she told me that her father died when she was twelve, and her mother took in boarders. Along with their meals, the boarders also had their laundry done for them. My mother's job was to help with this task.

She hand-scrubbed the clothes on a washboard, using a cake of hard yellow soap. Towels and sheets were boiled in a huge pot on a wood-burning stove, and then lifted out with a large wooden stick, and put into the sink for rinsing. This must have been a grueling job for such a young girl. No wonder she now enjoyed doing the laundry in her new washing machine, even though it had only a wringer. She then hung the wash on the line in the back yard.

Back in the Thirties, when I was about ten or eleven, one of my jobs was to help her take the clothes down after they were dry. Together we pulled off the wooden clothespins, dropped them into a cloth bag, and put the clothes into a wicker basket. It didn't matter how carelessly I dropped them into the basket, for mother ironed everything on Tuesday, including towels.

My best remembrance was taking down the sheets – always the last on the clotheslines. We each grabbed one end of the sheet, started folding it, and walked toward each other. When we met in the middle we joined our separate sides of the sheet together, and then we kissed. We never forgot.

Now I take my sheets out of the electric dryer and clumsily fold them by myself. But often, when I do, my thoughts go back to those wonderful days when Mother and I were enveloped in the smell of clean white sheets, brushed by wind and sun. For a few moments I am once again a little girl helping my mother with a task she really enjoyed, and receiving, as my reward, her loving kiss.