How did they manage?

I am sitting here listening to the soft hum of the dryer going downstairs in the laundry room and recalling a conversation with my dear aunt Freda and cousin Lynda on Monday of this week. We've decided how important it is for us to get together more to record the bits of our family history before no one is here to tell how it was in her coming of age days. Sadly, my own mother, the eldest of three girls, died in 1999 at age 67, and the youngest, Lois died in the summer of 2008 at age 72. With them went parts of the story except for what we remembered, sometimes accurately and  sometimes vaguely, depending on how interesting it seemed to the listener.


In my thirties, I was keen to take notes from my grandparents' tales of their own childhoods and teen years, growing up in Hants County from births in 1910, and 1911. Through the years of WWI, the twenties, marriage in 1930 and onward. How happy I am that I wrote down as much as I did. Nothing gives a stronger sense of how historical bias and revisionism happens then trying to piece together the whys and hows of your own family story.


Back to Monday, however.  Over tea and cake with lemon filling, Freda shared with us some notes she had begun writing of her earliest memories of life in Morden, then moving down into the valley to Aylesford when her father went to sea in the merchant navy in 1940. Even before her husband went away on ships, our grandmother as a young wife had to be resourceful and was absolutely insistent, no matter how little they had, that her family be comfortable and presentable. Much emphasis, then, was placed on having clean laundry.

Hauling well water to be heated if there was no indoor pump was normal for her. The washtub and scrub board with homemade lye soap and later Sunlight occupied many of her days, as grandfather's clothes from the sawmill or cranberry bog got very dirty. How hard this must have been on the hands of countless women who toiled and scrubbed their family's laundry clean! Not just shirts and pants, but sheets and quilts and heavy outer clothing. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.


No wonder my aunt's face lit up when she told of the luxury of them owning a machine when they moved down the mountain! I actually remember this behemoth which stood in Nana's kitchen corner, silent and hulking, until laundry day. It was electric with mysterious levers and rollers and on "the day" we were cautioned to keep fingers away and be scarce.

On fine breezy days, baskets of wet things were taken out the back door and hung to flap dry on crisscrossed clotheslines all over the back yard. All I could see sometimes were my grandmother's feet several rows over as she hung piece after piece up with wooden pins. In winter or on rainy days there was an apparatus in the kitchen which could be lowered to hang clothes on, then raised by a pulley-system to dry over the woodstove's heat.

Gaaaah! So much lugging and scrubbing, and wringing, draining, rinsing, wringing. And I haven't even mentioned the ironing.


I count myself so lucky to have been born in the fifties and to have had the true ease of automatic laundry appliances all of my life. Still, there is something so comforting about the smell of clothing dried on a line in fresh valley air that nothing can replace.


Thank you Great-Gram, Nana, and all my foremothers. I don't know how you did it.