Organza: A Memoir: Proof I Existed

ORGANZA

A MEMOIR: PROOF I EXISTED

Organza A Memoir: Proof I Existed is a work of fiction. Characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Peg Elliott Mayo

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SMASHWORDS EDITION

Cover art: Michael D. Chase

pegmayo@rivervoices.com

www.rivervoices.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Author’s Cautionary Note

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: Organza: A Long Life: 2001

Chapter 2. Honey Bun: 1918-1924

Chapter 3. Estelle Marie Smith: 1924-26

Chapter 4. Foot Loose and Fancy Free: 1926

Chapter 5. Twinkle, The Missus and Mommy: 1926-31

Chapter 6. Amelia Earhart, Bread Slicer:

Chapter 7. Lady Steel: 1932-40

Chapter 8. What Now? 1940

Chapter 9. Raggedy Ann and Jane Goodall 1940-41

Chapter 10. American Gothic 1941

Chapter 11. Lovely Hula Hands

Chapter 12. Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor 1942-46

Chapter 13. Missus In-between 1947

Chapter 14. Wild Goose 1950-54

Chapter 15. I Will Arise And Go Now 1952-53

Chapter 16. Rounding the Ring

Chapter 17. Earth Mudder: Centering 1956-63

Chapter 18. Stella By Starlight 1964-66

Chapter 19. Incompatible Species 1967

Chapter 20. Summer of Love 1967

Chapter 21. Tempos Fugues 1968-74

Chapter 22. Mulberry Bush 1975-77

Chapter 23. Shrinking Violet 1979-80

Chapter 24. Dark Woods 1984-93

Chapter 25, Organza 1994-2001

AUTHOR’S CAUTIONARY THOUGHTS

I’ve been entertained by trial readers’ assumptions that Organza is autobiographical. It is not. Specifically and emphatically, Jack and Marsha are in no way parallels to my sons and daughter. There is no parallel to Jill in my life.

The men in my life have mostly been providers, instructors, protectors and friends with just enough exceptions to make me appreciate the others.

All characters are fictional. I am not much of a traveler, though I’m a fool for friends’ stories and photos. My life hasn’t included managing a business.

Like any fiction writers, I use personal observation and experience as springboards to the narrative. Organza’s temperament or life are not mine. Admittedly, much of her philosophic musing is familiar and so is her affinity for dawgs. For forty years I worked as a clinical social worker. You meet a lot of interesting people when employed in San Diego County Mental Health facilities and County Correction Camp, Salvation Army Door of Hope Home for Unwed Mothers, operate a drop-in-telephone counseling program for the YMCA and have a private practice. In Organza I’ve been scrupulous never to violate confidentiality of clients, friends and family.

My father, Ben Elliott, enriched my life with good examples and pithy adages. The Daddy saids are quotations from that good, wise man. How I wish he could have lived long enough to see how profoundly I respect him.

Organza is, as she herself would say, a phantasamagloria.

DEDICATION

Organza had a lot of help.

Ijourie Fisher was a friend. Her insights, critiques and generosity of spirit materially affected the progress of the writing. That she enjoyed listening to the emerging book read aloud was a particular shared pleasure. She graciously allowed herself to become Organza’s cover girl. Ijie’s marble sculpture, stained glass and watercolors were alive with appreciation of the natural world and exuberant color. She went to Africa to see lions at home.

When over ninety, she moved from Miami to rural Oregon to live near her daughter and quietly adapted. Ijourie died peacefully daughter April by her side. She was ninety-four well-lived years.

April recently sent this message: Ijie passed away around noon today.  Her brow is smooth and her face relaxed.  Several days ago she came out with this remarkable statement: Death comes so fast and takes such a long time.

Don Pauls, my husband-friend, has given support in all my writing. During the creation of Organza, he protected my long hours at the keyboard. When the book was complete, he was a willing editor-listener as I read it aloud.

David Feinstein and Donna Eden, precious friends, are generous supporters in ways that made possible the creation and production of this book.

Aaron Willoughby, my own personal grandson, did the heavy lifting in formatting and seeing to publication details. Contacted him at mac@chadwickgraphics.com

Because of the complexity of Organza’s long life, it seemed prudent to have trial readers to comment on readability. I'm grateful for their insights.

Jerry Campbell kept me sane during the complex process of learning to format for eBooks.

Margaret O’Neill is the very model of a modern copyeditor. She’s both meticulous and patient, then tops it off with punctuality and good humor.

Mike Chase, the cover artist, is an adopted brother, and has been a skilled, calm, steady presence.

My daddy, Ben Elliott, said wise things too lately understood, yet finally preserved here.

The Internet was a splendid, accessible way to check multiple facts, adding authenticity to the narrative.

INTRODUCTION

ORGANZA: A LONG LIFE

2001

Age: 97

It's past time to tote up what I’ve learned and how I changed from Estelle Smith to Honey Bun to The Missus to Twinkle to Amelia Earhart to—it goes on. Now, I call myself Organza. Organza isn't sturdy, like overall material. You have to watch not to step on the hem or it'll rip. You can see right through it and it's airy, not concealing. I’ve got a lot of mends from all the fall downs and rips through the years, but how can you live without having to do some darning?

What have I got to hide now? It's bold to say, but Organza's kind of pretty, if not very substantial. I like my white curls, now I’ve become a natural blond. I'm still straight as a bean pole, being spared osteo and bunions. Got to thank my ancestors for that. And hard work.

Writing like this beats going to the Senior Center and comparing ailments. Not that all of them attending the classes and lectures are like that. I have two friends there. Vince Cleveland, he's only eighty-one and still flirts and dances and plays grab ass even if he can't always remember why. Janice Clark is a year older than me and twice as smart. She uses a scooter to get around, but her mind is faster than a speeding bullet.

I have lunch there ($2.50 for everything!) twice a week and Sunday brunch. Vince and Janice, let alone Jack and Marsha, are too straight to hear this story, but maybe someone else will want to. Straight as in straight and narrow.

What's the difference between an autobiography and a memoir? I think an autobiography is official, with dates, accomplishments and no imagination. That's not for me. I've always been self-indulgent, according to both Mother and Bird, so why stop now? Here's my pledge to my made-up reader: I'll write my truth, which isn't just facts. It would be nice to prove I existed.

I refuse to be more organized than feels good. Let it spurt or let it leak. I think it was James Joyce, that self-important Irishman, that invented stream-of-consciousness writing as if everything suggested some thing else, usually unrelated to the last idea. You have to be flexible to read that stuff, but I like it better than the Just the facts, m'am style of writing. Stretches the mind. That's how this memoir seems to be going. Really, whatthehell?

Since I don't know who I'm writing for besides myself, there's no way to know what to censor to spare delicate sensitivities or blow up big to impress. I do think truth and facts are different. It is a fact that I am older than Methuselah's widow, but the truth is I'm every age I've ever been before. Might as well back up and start at the beginning and then skitter around when the stream of consciousness skitters around a boulder or quiets down in a pool.

My childhood house was big by today's standards. Three bedrooms and a cottage. They'd call it a mother-in-law cottage now and use it to stash a busybody old lady who's not quite yet fodder for a nursing home. Daddy built it for Mother as a twenty-fifth anniversary present. He always said, Once smitten, twice foolish.

It was her art studio. Mother was very artistic with her painting and embroidery and weaving. She called it Shangri-La, and said she'd never get old if she spent enough time there. It didn't work that way because she died at her loom at forty-seven, but Daddy had tried his best. He just dwindled away, smoking his Camels, until he went to the big Shangri-La in the Sky two years later to catch up with her. I was thirteen.

Writing this makes me sad. Not because they died. Everyone does that, but because I was too pigheaded to learn all I could from them. My punishment came in not knowing and, then in having kids who, like myself, had no interest in learning anything from someone who’d stumbled down the same road ahead of them. They’ve gone their own ways which is probably better than not.

I wonder if anyone younger will read this. My cohort have their own stories. Charlie said something interesting. That just writing itself could feel good and if somebody else liked what was written, that was like sunrise in heaven on Easter morning.

Wooded Area of Eden, Southwestern Estates. Middle of the California coast. Pimento Township. Dirt roads with marble-sized round mudstones. Coyotes. Ground Squirrels. Rattlers. Hawks. Narcissus and sour grass with miniature yellow bugles like daffodils. Cliffs chewed back by endless tides, slamming thousands of miles of animated water against soft limestone and decomposed granite. My childhood was good, at least the first part, except the coyotes kept taking cats right off the porch. I read a lot, laying in warm sand and watching big red ants making hills. If I didn't stir them up, they didn't bite me. There was a lesson in that.

Then came the influenza epidemic, World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and World War II. After that Korea and Vietnam.

Lot of migrants or military from colder, poorer parts of the country looking for easier lives and riches. Little rain. Very little rain. Ground owls. Sage. Never needed mittens. No snow shovels. That's how the West was lost.

I am a second generation in America and I felt like a real native. Only lately have I wondered how the actual natives felt about the scene. The new people. People wanting chapter and verse about those hectic years better do their own reading. I’m not going to do it for them. The Internet makes it easy. No need to get dressed and drive to the library. I respect the library, but the Web is quicker.

After I wrote all that, I tried to get straight in the head what I was doing and for what. It didn’t come easy, but I’ve a sort of plan. A bookkeeper would start at page one, February 29th, 1904, Leap Year Day, and tick off the days until today, March 1, 2001. Not calculating leap years, that’s 35,241 days, more or less. And I sure won’t finish today!

Counting a birthday every four years, I’m twenty-four years old. Too bad the mirror doesn’t reflect that instead of a skinny almost-ninety-six-year-old body with white hair and false teeth. I’ve still got my brains. Which is because I’ve never stop exercising them. Use it or lose it. I’d rather wear out than rust out.

I can keep books, but it is like pitching hay for the horses in the morning and pitching manure in the evening. Predictable. I never did like that idea. Why’m I doing this a-tall? Well, what else is there for me to do? Sit in a rocker and count how far the same push would take me on a bicycle? Dumbdumbdumb.

I’m doing this because I’ve always liked thinking and figuring things out more than having them just handed to me. I like my computer, even gave it a name: Charley. Why not? I thought about the big things that have happened in the world—wars, inventions, earthquakes, Prohibition, pantyhose—they all affected me, but I haven’t done anything about them except just hang on until they passed. It is amazing what can be outlasted.

I don’t know why I have to have a plan. Well, yes I do, to a degree. I remember Old Man Ellis. When I was six or seven, Mother would give me a bag with cookies or a loaf of bread and a slab of cheese, then have me take it down the road to him. The bread and cheese always got there intact. Old Man Ellis would be sitting in the glider on his porch. He was a great one for the birds. Had little houses on poles, nest boxes for swallows under the eaves and three or four feeders.

He liked me to come because then he had someone he could talk to, not just sit, staring. Trouble was he had so little practice talking he’d mostly forgot how to do it nicely and he either didn’t have or wouldn’t wear his false teeth, so he splattered when he talked. I learned real fast to sit on the porch railing, out of range. He’d start talking before I got through the gate and up the steps. I’d hand him the bag—lighter than when I left home on cookie days—and he’d tell me to thank Mother.

Back to why I need a plan for this memoir. Old Man Ellis would just reach into his memory and things out, mostly unrelated. He’d start telling how he rode all the way from Delusion, Ohio to Los Angeles on the cow catcher of the train. Before finishing that story, he’d start in on how, when he was a trolley man in San Francisco, he had to wear a motorman’s friend. Eventually, someone explained to me that he had a way of peeing in a rubber hot water bag strapped to his leg connected somehow to his thing.

Anyway, I need a plan not be all disconnected and scrambled. I just looked back on what I’ve already written and am moderately amused. Right now, here’s how it seems to shape up. I can go in sequence by dates. I could compound the days into decades. I can pick out the important people or what I’ve done to keep busy. Of course, if I write about others it’s the same as gossip. Gossip is when there’s only one point of view and the others can’t defend themselves. I don’t see how I can write my life’s story without it.

My best sleeping pills are movie star and politician’s biographies. Nothing embarrassing gets put down, but every flea bite and gold-plated stupidity by somebody else gets put in. Two pages and it’s nighty-night for me. Blah-blah. One thing I sympathize about in remembering Old Man Ellis, is how much has happened and the pressure in my throat trying to belch it all out to anyone who’ll sit on the porch railing for even half a minute.

I thought about going backwards, sliding down the banister of nine decades, but that would just be showing off, plus there’s the splinters to worry about. Doing it then-to-now, with permission to take a few leaps either way, has got to be the plan. Sounds boring, but, hey! That’s something a smart memoirist can take as a dare. Why not?

CHAPTER ONE

CHILDHOOD

1908-1918

Ages: 4 -14

The first time I remember being alive was when I fell backwards off the swing under the oak tree and knocked myself out. One minute I was leaning way back, pumping hard by stretching my legs, then pulling myself upright, legs tucked under. I got so high the rope kind of hiccupped and that’s all I remember.

I was drooling on dry leaves on the ground when I came to. I was, maybe, four. Naturally, I went looking for sympathy. It was in short supply. Mother shook her head when she saw I’d gotten my clothes dirty. Daddy said I had to pay attention or I’d never live to see five.

Right away I caught on that if he was right, then it meant being four was just one of the ages I could be. I had to go sit on the porch to think about it. I knew there was nothing before one and if I was four-going-on-five, then I was moving, like an inch worm crawling over the grass. Later, I figured out the worm lived on the grass and dew. It took a longer time before I even wondered how big the lawn was and what would happen to Missy Worm when she got to the hot cement.

Once I knew I was alive and growing, things changed. When I was six, Old Man Ellis died. It was like this: I went over to his place with one of Mother’s brown bags of cookies. Chocolate chip. He wasn’t in the glider, so I knocked on the door. No answer. I went in with the idea of leaving the cookies on the kitchen table in case he was sleeping in like Daddy did on Sundays while Mother went to church.

Old Man Ellis was in the kitchen, all right. He was sprawled out on the floor and he wasn’t moving. It is funny peculiar—not funny ha-ha—what a person remembers. Old Man Ellis was in tatty old flannel pajamas and a frying pan was upside down by his hand. There were eggs splattered all over the floor. I went for Mother right away.

I asked Mother why Old Man Ellis had fallen down and wouldn’t answer me. She said he was dead and we should pray for him. When I didn’t understand, she tried to explain that everyone dies and, if they’ve been good, go to live with Jesus in Heaven. Right then I got in trouble when I asked if Old Man Ellis had been good. She said she didn’t really know, but doubted it. He’d turned down her invitations of a ride to church, but it wouldn’t hurt to pray for his soul.

Daddy was in his shop. He was cleaning his rifle for deer season coming up in a week. Daddy didn’t go to church either, so when I told him what Mother said, he got real quiet for a while. Then he gave me the best answer possible and what I’ve hung onto all these years. Estelle, baby, nobody really knows what happens after you die. Nobody who can talk to you has died, so all they know is what other people have told them.

I said Mother told me to believe in Jesus Christ and keep my nose clean by obeying my parents and teachers if I wanted to get past Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates into Heaven. Daddy said that she was entitled to her opinion. He said I’d have to make up my own mind. Daddy was different from Mother in that. She said what was what, so there. He said I had to make up my own mind. I went his way and now, more than ninety years late.

I couldn’t wrap my head around God the way Mother explained Him to me. Still can’t. What kind of father would lay out so many ways to feel good and then threatened to roast alive you if you touched any of them? If He made everything, where’d the devil come from? I learned real fast that questions like that were going to have one effect on Mother and a different one on Daddy.

He’d say, Good question. Let me know when you get the answer.

She’d send me to my room after shaking me until my teeth rattled for impertinence and potential atheism. When I was there I was supposed to pray for forgiveness. I didn’t, though, because I didn’t know what my sin was.

Probably nobody reading this knows what life was like in the times I was growing up. Since circumstances alter cases, like Daddy said, I ought to rummage around for memories.

Naturally, I don’t remember anything from the year 1904 when I was born in Pimento California. A lot happened like big fires in cities, floods and people being mean to each other. I know bad things happen, but I prefer to think about good ones. One good thing was Jimmy Dorsey, the band leader, was born the same day as me. He died in ’59, but I danced to his swing music twice before he croaked. People get all upset when I say croaked or kicked the bucket. I kind of like poking the dull ones with things like that. It’s better than passed away, like passing something worn out on to the Goodwill.

Glenn Miller was born the next day after me. I never did see him, but I danced to his song, Chattanooga Choo Choo. Sally Rand was born that year, too. Once she was grown, she use to dance, bare-butt naked, on stage with a pair of ostrich feather fans, just teasing the living daylights out of the men who went to the burlesque shows she put on. Made her famous.

Pimento is a small town on the coast between Santa Lucia and Golden. It’s twice as big now and I like it half as much. Daddy was a bricklayer-carpenter. He could have worked anywhere, he was that good. Sometimes he went to places like Sacramento and San Francisco to work on big projects. He specialized in smokestacks and chimneys. The brick chimney he helped build on the Plumber Building in Oakland was so showy it made the newspapers. He’d put in a double line of black bricks that spiraled around the usual red ones so it looked like that solid chimney was sort of moving. I can’t explain it.

He made good money for the time and we had our own two-story house on Gladiola Street. Lots of the time he only worked five days a week. That was long before it was general practice. Contractors were always asking him to work on their jobs. He spent considerable time in his shop making or fixing things, sharpening tools and reading.

He read in the living room, too, but only things that wouldn’t get Mother riled. Things like history. He couldn’t get enough of the Civil War or Abraham Lincoln. In the shop, he read about Charles Darwin. If he’d done that in the house, Mother would have been tearing her hair out. She thought Darwin was the devil’s spawn for saying that the Garden of Eden was a wrong idea altogether. If the bible said it, then it was so. No argument. No discussion. That was Mother all the way

I bet Daddy would have liked a son, but he made do with me. I did my best. What he liked talking about was how things worked. Not just mechanical things, even though he was curious and ingenious with them. No, he wondered out loud if people evolved like Darwin said the birds on the Galapagos Islands had. The thing that has stuck with me was his wondering if Chinamen and Negroes were the same as us, except for their color. He couldn’t guess why Chinamen were yellow, but figured Negroes might be dark so as not to get sunburned in Africa.

Ideas like that put Mother on her knees, praying for him. He hardly talked in front of her about what she called heathen claptrap. I, on the other hand, ate it up. Daddy said he hoped I’d learn three things from him to remember.

One, to ask questions even if everyone else thought a matter settled. Two, to keep my body healthy by avoiding overheated rooms, corsets and too much gravy.

Those things came easy and have never been much of a problem.

He said judging people as good, bad or indifferent is a bad policy. He said it was like saying a horse could only be black, white or spotted. Dumb from word one. In his opinion, everybody had good, ill or vacant parts. He admitted some sure could keep one or another under wraps, but as Darwin said, everything is on its way to being something else. He wondered if a kangaroo, like in the one his Illustrated Living Oddities book, might in a hundred years change into something brand new that we couldn’t even imagine. Of course, that got me to thinking what it might be.

Another thing he taught me was that people are not turned out by a Great Cookie Cutter in the sky. He told me than when he was a boy, back in the 1870’s, there was a lady blacksmith in town. No one had ever imagined such a thing. Seems her husband had died when a horse kicked him in the chest. The woman, Sarah Upton, had to take care of three children. She’d always helped out in smithy and just kept on. She never liked horses after what had happened to Henry, so she started making trivets, fancy clothes hooks, picture frames, door stops and other things like that. Made a good living.

The best part was that after a few years she remarried. Her new hubby was the local school teacher. It just goes to show that people aren’t all made in the same mold. I got it.

Pretty soon I was using tools to build a bird house with three stories, shake roof and trays to clean out the droppings. I found out about saws, hammers and mitered joints. Also how to measure accurately and how to put paint on without slopping it all over. Swallows used the house for as long as I can remember after Daddy hung it from the oak tree’s horizontal branch, off to one side of my swing. Eventually, it fell apart in a wind storm, but that was ‘way later.

Tools were the most useful thing he taught me, in day-to-day terms. I loved being out there with him talking and showing me things. He smoked a lot. Nobody knew it was bad for you in those days. He use to joke he only smoked once a day. That was because he’d light one cigarette on the burning butt of his last one all day long. I didn’t keep score, but I’ll bet he smoked a couple or more packs a day. It got him in the end, along with grief over Mother.

When he built Mother’s arts and crafts studio, I was right there. Looking back, I can see he cared very much about her despite her being so scratchy about how he thought. She always made sure there was either apple pie or chocolate cake in the bread box, too. I was middle-aged before I caught on that affection came in ways other than nice words or pats on the shoulder.

Somebody reading this, if anyone ever does, could think Mother was a religious fanatic. That’s not quite right. How she felt about being a church-going Christian was mainstream for the times in our neck of the woods. She was just conventional as far as manners and religion were concerned. Innovation scared her, I think.

Daddy had an inquiring mind about science, politics and religion. Mother thought those things were all settled. Where she shone was artistically. Until I got married myself, I had never slept on an unembroidered pillow case. She could crochet and knit and tole paint. When she arranged flowers she used imagination. She’d put a blossoming branch from the apple tree in a vase with shiny red apples heaped around the bottom. I never saw anyone else do that.

She made all of her own and my clothes plus dress shirts for Daddy. When she put Thanksgiving dinner on the table, it looked like a magazine picture. We always had company for holiday meals. I remember her pecan tarts. They were miniature pies with crimped crusts and golden filling. She made dozens in muffin tins. I don’t know where she got the time or idea.

The Christmas tree was something to see! This was before electric lights. Everyone put candles in holders, with little drip pans clipped on the branches. Every so often you’d hear of someone’s house burning down. Not ours. Mother made her own candles, scented with lavender. They fit in tiny glasses from Woolworth’s and held in wire holders clipped to the branches. Daddy made them.

Her inventiveness had her beading fancy purses, with fringe that moved like a wave. I’ve always admired nice fringe. She sold quite a few of them. When she got it into her head to try water coloring, Daddy decided she needed a studio as much as he needed his shop on the back of the garage. I got to help, mostly planing the wood for shelves and sills. It was fun watching the long ringlets come out of the tool. They smelled real good.

I think I wrote before that she called the cottage Shangri-La and said she wouldn’t die now that she had it. She did, though, when she was in her forties, of a heart attack. Strange idea—your heart attacking you. I’ve always hoped it was excitement at a new idea. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go. I was thirteen and could have used her help when, a year later, I got The Curse of Women.

Up to when she died, I’d been a small package, full of myself. That changed fast. I took over the housework and cooking. The neighbors helped some, but it mostly fell on me. Daddy missed her so much he stopped reading or even doing much brickwork. Just enough for money to get by. He’d sit and stare, smoking his Camels, even though they gave him coughing fits where he spit up blood.

I nursed Daddy when he got sickly and confused. It was really hard to have to give him sponge baths when he was too weak to get in-and-out of the tub. He died two years after Mother of a hemorrhage and, as the doctor said, bled out. He was just a week short of fifty-four. He had a hard death.

I was fourteen. It was the worst day of my life. Now I’m almost twice as old as Daddy. It twists my mind to be older than my parents. I’m not going to write any more about it.

I keep trying to imagine what someone would want to know about that time before the First World War to End Wars (TFWWTOEW). Keeping a home operating was sure different. I can’t say harder, because we had no idea what was coming.

Cooking was on a big cast iron range. Everyday we cut squaw wood. Nowadays, if I say squaw wood, people roll their eyes and try to instruct me to talk more refined. Well, it was squaw wood. If an Indian woman cut it, carried it and cooked with it what else could you call it? White women did the same job. People today think squaw is a nasty word. It isn’t, unless you think that way. I don’t and I’m not going to pretend different. Getting old has privileges, but you've got to grab them.

Back to the cook stove. Getting fire going was easier if there were embers left from earlier. In winter we kept that in mind and fed the stove between cooking times. Naturally, we had to let it go out every few days so as to clean out the ashes and soot. Nobody’s idea of a good time. Just necessary, so it got done.

There were cooler parts of the stove top where you could cook things that shouldn’t boil or sizzle. Like eggs or soup. Back by the chimney it was blistering hot once a good draft got going. That’s where we heated water. Water for dishes, sponge baths, laundry and canning.

It took skill to make bread, roast meat and scalloped spuds as well as pies and cakes. You had to know your stove’s quirks and talents, what kind of wood burned long and steady rather than hot and fast. People knew to waste not so as to want not.

In winter or rainy weather, we dried clothes on an Irish halo. That’s a wooden rack with a pulley. We’d lay the wet clothes on the rack, then haul it up to the hot ceiling close to over the stove. We had high ceilings back then. Usually we did wash on Monday.

Which brings me to the how of doing the wash. By the time I can really remember, we had an electric washer with a ringer. It had an agitator swishing clothes or towels or sheets. No one had invented a hot water heater appliance. We had to heat the water in the stove in the biggest containers we could lift, then bring them out to the back porch.

You sorted your clothes so your napkins didn’t follow an underwear load in the tub. Yep, we used the same wash water as long as it wasn’t too scummy or the dye hadn’t run from new socks being washed the first time. Then we drained it into a bucket that had to be carried off and dumped on plants in