When we were very young I think my mother had an automatic washing machine, but no dryer. There wasn't a place in the laundry room of that 1951 custom home for a dryer. We had a big, double-size clothesline and hung everything out, even in the winter. Probably in that day dryers weren't all that common. When that washer wore out, she got a wringer washer and I always enjoyed doing the laundry because it was so much fun running the wet clothes through the wringer, watching them get all flat and dry looking. Sometimes there would be air bubbles, so they'd puff up and then get flattened.

There is a real technique to using one of those old washers because it only gets filled up with water once. The clothes are sorted by color and dirt, with the lightest pile getting washed first, then the mediums, and then the darkest colors and dirtiest. My dad wore gray cotton work pants that she dyed to keep them looking newer, so they were always the very last load, and the water would end up very dark.

Each load goes into the machine with detergent (sometimes she made her own soap from lard and lye) and are agitated for however long you feel like, and then run through the wringer into the laundry tray (as we called it), a deep sink next to the washer. The wringer pivots so you can aim it in different directions. I don't remember if we changed the rinse water between loads, maybe we did as needed.

Sometimes we just swished the clothes around in it by hand, and then put them through the wringer into the laundry basket. Other times we might have stored several loads in the laundry tray and clothes baskets, drained the washer by way of the built-in drain pipe the automatic washer would use, filled it with clean water, and agitated the clothes for the rinse cycle, but I don't remember doing that.



Our washer was better-maintained than this one, but was square like this. The hose on top is the drain hose. To fill the washer, we attached a short garden hose to the faucet of the laundry tray.

We used the wringer washer until I was in high school, and my mom finally bought another automatic that wasn't nearly as durable as that reliable Maytag. Even after that, my sister and I always washed our own clothes. There was a reason for it, something like so I knew my clothes were washed the way I wanted them done, but right now it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because I don't remember them ever not being done properly.

Oh wait. I do remember someone, and I don't know who, dyeing all the underwear orange one time. My mother had a hysterectomy when I was a freshman in high school and when we went to pick her up at the hospital, she was telling us that she was embarrassed for the nurse who helped her get dressed to see her orange underwear, but she just pretended that she liked that color.

Now that our reason for doing our own laundry comes back to me, and I can hear my prissy sister saying something like 'from now on, I'm doing it myself.' And of course I always did what she did because we were very close growing up.