Wash Day Memories
By Lavona Richardson
We would have wash day about once a week and do all the laundry at the same time. We used home made soap that we made from tallow after Daddy butchered a cow and gave us the t allow. We would make soap outside and use lye being careful to not get it in our eyes.
How well I remember washing the different batches in the washer with the whites first and ending with the work pants. After the clothes agitated in the washer we would put them through a wringer to a rinse water and then a second rinse water that had bluing in it to make the clothes whiter. We took great pride in having white clothes. Finally you would put the clothes through the wringer for the last time and put them in a clothes basket to take out to the clothes line. I would always hang diapers together, towels together and sheets on the front lines. Sometimes the clothes would be frozen stiff almost before you got them on the line. If it started to rain we would rush out to bring it the dried clothes before they got wet again.
After bringing in the dried clothes we would sprinkle the clothes to iron and roll them up and put them in the washer where they would wait for us to iron them. We couldn’t wait too long or they would get moldy.
Wash day would usually end by draining the water from the washer and wash tubs and then mopping the floor.
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