A Poor Family’s Foolish Mistake in Doing Laundry in America
Prior to migrating to America, my family resided in rural Asia. Picture a small village surrounded by mountains, connected to neighboring villages by dirt roads, and fields of rice and vegetables with cattle roaming about. Almost everyone’s a farmer, and living an improvised way of life. Technology, electricity, and indoor plumbing were luxuries few can afford. Therefore, one of the daily chores of the people, mostly women, was to handwash their families’ clothes either in the river or by the public well. My family, particularly my mother, was no exception.
As a child, I watched my mother gather all our dirty clothes in a bucket and bring it to the well every few days to wash. There, she is met by a few other ladies in the village. They would chat and wash simultaneously. Clothes washing is done in the mornings to avoid the wrath of the afternoon sun. After all is done, hands red and wrinkled from the task, my mother would pick up the hand wrung clothes in the bucket and go home to hang them across our patio to sun dry.
After arriving in America, we soon discovered that clotheslines are illegal and/or shamed upon. One way my family was able to circumvent the obstacle is by hand-washing clothes and hanging them in the fenced backyard, hidden from pedestrians’ views. Luckily, the neighbors never complained. However, there’s the problem of cold winters when anything with moisture being outside automatically freezes into a sheet of ice. To solve this issue, we hanged the clothes a few pieces at a time by the furnace.
One may ask, why go through this much trouble if you could go to the laundromat? Well to a newly immigrated family with no money, used to living on the bare minimum and hand-washing their whole lives, spending $3 ($1.50 on washing, $1.50 drying) on laundry frequently seems like a waste. $3 USD converted to home town currency is worth a day’s worth of groceries is how my family thought of it. However, even with all our strategies, there are a few items that prevented us from avoiding the laundromat entirely — bed sheets and top sheets.
Bed sheets are too large to dry in the summer, and would never dry in the winter. If they hanged for more than a few days, they would smell. As my mother begrudgingly picked out quarters for the machines from the spares change can, she thought of an idea. Why don’t we handwash the sheets to save $1.50 and then just take it to dry at the laundromat? So that’s what we did. After she washed the three sets of bed sheets with its matching top sheets in a large plastic bucket, she took it all out to the backyard and enlisted my help in wringing out the long pieces of fabric. She took one end and I the other, and we stood seven feet apart. Then, we started twisting the sheets in opposite directions until the length shortened and we can’t twist anymore. This process was repeated until all sheets are done.
At last, we gathered the wet sheets and put them in a bag and took it to the laundromat. After the wet sheets were in the dryer, we inserted $1.50 and waited. After the hour has elapsed, we felt the laundry and it was still wet, so another $1.50 was added. After another hour, the sheets still felt damped so a few more quarters were added. During this time, we noticed that other people were able to dry their clothes in one go, so what did we do wrong? That’s when we realized that hand wringing is no match for the powerful spinning of washing machines, and we paid (literally) for that mistake in longer dryer time. So, by attempting to save $1.50 in washing, we actually spent more money in the dryer and wasted time, water and soap on fruitless efforts.
Originally published at https://limemstories.com on February 2, 2020.
