When we
landed at Heathrow airport in London on our way to Italy, Paul vomited at the
sudden descent of the plane. When James woke up we discovered he had wet
himself while sleeping. The twins, of course, were not perfect at eating
so their clothes had splashes and spills from the meals we had shared with
them. In addition, the crew hadn't allowed us to keep the disposable diapers in
the cabin as they had some of their own. And of course when they ran out half
way across the U.S., ours were inconveniently stowed in the luggage
compartment. So, the twins were damp and smelly by the time we arrived in
London. My cousin Tony's wife, Maggie, offered their washing machine so I could
once again start with clean clothes. While at their house we noticed Matthew
was hot and his fever was 101.5. Again, Maggie helped by taking us to her
doctor who looked at Matthew's throat and prescribed penicillin. Later in our
short visit to my aunt's house outside London, Paul came down with the flu,
vomiting on her carpeted stairs, and in their car on the way back to London.
Then Margaret Ann started running a fever. We visited extended family while
juggling vomiting, hot children, dispensing pills, and doing laundry. Clean
clothes were a necessity, and the struggle to keep them that way was constant, both on
the journey and on our arrival in Italy.
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| At my grandmother's house with Maggie (holding Matthew) and her daughter, Anna, who seems to fascinate Paul! |
On that first morning at Gabi, after we had eaten and the children were warm, I had two pressing needs, groceries and laundry. Zio Silvio had offered to take us to the grocery store later in the morning, so I had time to wash some dirty clothes. Since my mother-in-law had washed their clothes by hand, it looked like I would have to do the same. I found some soap under the kitchen sink and looked around.
My
moves from country to country, and my encounters with all different washing
situations gave me courage when we arrived at Gabi. Before we left England in the mid-fifties, my
mother had a washing machine that spun much of the moisture from the laundry,
and she used a clothesline outside. As
soon as I was old enough to reach, I had learned how to peg up the
laundry. After we finished, she secured
the prop—a long pole with a fork in the end that hooked the clothesline—and
raised the line high to catch the breeze.
In the first small town we moved to in Canada, we
bought a used a washer that we wheeled into the kitchen. We filled it from the kitchen sink, let it
agitate for a while, then fed the soapy clothes through the hand-cranked wringer,
rinsed them, and wrung them again. We
hung the clothes outside on a regular clothesline in summer, but in winter we
had to hang them inside on a makeshift clothesline strung across the small,
unheated woodshed adjoining the house.
Often they took days to dry or froze instead. When we moved to Toronto, in our first
apartment building we did our wash in a community laundry room with an
automatic wringer-washer, and in the rooming house we moved to later, we used
an old washing machine with no wringer at all, down in a dark, damp
basement. In each case we moved in,
checked out the situation, and then my mother figured out the best and most
economical way to do what we needed. She
might have given an exasperated sigh, but she didn’t spend long regretting what
wasn’t there. That wasn’t her way. Like my mother, I tried to fix things rather
than lament at how broken they were.
These skills came in handy the first few weeks in Italy.
With no washing machine at Gabi, a Laundromat would
have been a good solution, but we didn’t know of one locally, and we had no
car. So, after an exasperated sigh, I rolled up my sleeves and got to
work. The most obvious place to do a
large load of laundry was the little half-bath, which was fed directly by the
hot-water tank. I found a laundry basket
in the garage and loaded it with the dirty clothes. The bathtub was deep, so I filled it with
soap and hot water, and plunged all of the whites into the hot suds. But because it was deep I had to lean over
and reach down. It was a royal pain in
the back. I soaked, then scrubbed, then
wrung the soapy water from each item of clothing, and piled them in the basket
behind me. As the water cooled, I
remembered the sequences of the wringer-washer in Canada, and I dunked the darker
clothes in the still-soapy warm water, then scrubbed and wrung them. Then I drained the tub and filled it with
clean water, rinsed each set of clothes separately, then wrung them again, as
dry as I could. My arms ached and my
hands stung, but I was satisfied with my pile of clean clothes.
While I
worked, I asked George to figure out a place to hang the wet clothes. With the children trailing behind him, he
searched the cupboards and found a ball of string. The balcony on the courtyard side of the
house was the longest, as it ran the length of the building, so George had the
boys help him tie a makeshift line between the balcony uprights. I draped the lighter items over that string
and, after cleaning off the railings, I hung the rest of the laundry over
them. Luckily our welcome drizzle from
the previous day had subsided, so we were able to take advantage of the thin
May sunshine. I hoped everything would
dry by the time we returned from shopping.
I washed the laundry by hand for the better part of
three weeks. The wringing created
blisters, then raw spots, then calluses.
I couldn’t complain too loudly, because George chopped and hauled wood
for the stove in the kitchen so we could stay warm. He formed blisters and calluses too, and both
of us felt the strain on previously unknown muscles. But I wouldn’t have complained much anyway
because I was in a high state of “adaptation mode.” I had watched my mother figure out how to
adapt to the various conditions and strange ways that we had encountered as we
moved from country to country and house to house, so it was second nature for me to do the same.
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