Airing up the laundry

Laundry began with grabbing a couple buckets and heading down the road for water. Luckily his mother was adding a few more bricks of coal to the stove in the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to retrieve those too. He carried the electric agitator (about as generous a name as he was willing to give their washing machine) into the house and set it in the kitchen. It would be a lot warmer in here than the outdoor kitchen, standing in the winter air.

            The electric agitator needed to be babysat – he stood next to it, reaching in the quickly greying water to give the spinner a nudge of encouragement every now and then. The bucket of rinse water on the floor was waiting for its first load, the shirts. Then it would be sheets, pants, underwear and finally socks. Good thing those were grey and black to begin with – the water in the agitator wouldn’t be changed. At least he had control over the rinse water, he thought, making one of his numerous trips to dump it over the manure in the cow pen. It wasn’t a lot of fun sliding on a pair of cotton underwear that could stand up on their own.

            The underwear however hadn’t been as stiff as the laundry he ran into today, and he meant that quite literally: he bumped his head on laundry, a string of words he never thought would be matched together until that moment, ducking beneath the line, heading towards the outhouse near the field, from where the horse would soon come and make a line right through his freshly hanging sheets – sheets by bareback, a trick he wasn’t too keen to see turned again.