WASH DAY

Winter wash days at the Apps farm often reached epic status. In theory the task was simple enough. On Monday morning before leaving for school, my brothers or I would fetch in several pails of water from the pump house and fill the copper boiler that Ma had carried in from the woodshed and placed on the hottest part of the cookstove. She waited for the water to steam just short of boiling. Meanwhile, Pa pushed the kitchen table aside and then dragged the gasoline-powered Maytag wringer washing machine and the rinse tubs in from the woodshed and organized them in the middle of the kitchen. Up to this point, everything usually had gone according to plan. A little water might have spilled on the kitchen floor and a little more dripped on the hot stove, creating a sizzle and a little steam cloud, but nothing had slowed down the process or hindered it in any meaningful way. Not yet, anyway.

Ma searched for the homemade soap, a product my Aunt Louise proudly concocted from animal fat, lye, water, and who knows what else. Her bars of yellowish brown soap were irregular in shape but uniform in their power to remove the toughest, most resistant dirt from any piece of skin or cloth the soap touched. It was strong stuff. Aunt Louise made enough soap so all the close relatives had an ample supply, usually enough for a year, and she passed out her annual gift of cleanliness at Christmastime.

With the washing machine in place—a long flexible metal tube now snaked from the gasoline engine out a crack in the kitchen door to the woodshed—Ma began dipping warm water from the copper boiler into the machine’s tub, where an agitator waited to scuff the dirty farm clothes back and forth, back and forth, until they were clean.

We had no electricity and thus no electric motor to power the machine. Instead, we depended on a Briggs & Stratton gasoline engine to do the work. Briggs & Stratton, a Wisconsin company with its roots in Milwaukee, was a longstanding and well-respected manufacturer of gasoline engines. Pa had bought the washing machine based on the company’s reputation. The salesman had proclaimed the little engine’s virtues, from its power and sturdiness to its relative quiet—if it ever can be said that a gasoline engine, sans muffler, is quiet. However, the salesman made no mention of the ease of starting the machine, and Pa never asked about this critical characteristic.

The little black engine, neatly tucked under the white enamel washing machine, required but two controls for its operation: a kick-start lever that stuck out from underneath the washer far enough that a big masculine foot could pounce on it; and a thin, silver-colored choke wire with a small knob on its end. Starting the engine should have been simple enough: pull on the choke wire to close the little flap in the carburetor, and push down on the kick-start lever with your foot. There were no other controls to fiddle with, no other instructions to worry about.

With the machine partially filled with steaming water to give it some heft and thus keep it from leaping around the kitchen floor during the starting process, Pa pulled on the choke wire and pushed firmly down on the kick-start lever. A loud purring noise resulted. Pa repeated. More purring. Pa repeated the move again; more purring. Again and again. Ma’s face wore the perplexed look she got when something wasn’t going well. She had observed the saga of the starting of the washing machine more times than she wanted to recall. As the winter weeks wore on, starting the engine grew increasingly more taxing and challenging.

Pa was a man of great patience, but when his patience wore thin, it was not a pretty thing to see. His face got red, his brow furrowed, his glasses steamed up, and a fiery stream of cuss words flew out of his mouth. He called the little engine every name in the considerable vocabulary of invective that he had gained while spending many younger years working as a hired hand in a variety of jobs. For a kid like me, who was just beginning to develop a cussing vocabulary, it was an educational moment of the highest import.

After fifteen minutes of choke pulling, kick-start lever pushing, and cussing, Ma said, “Herm, the water in the machine is cooling down.”

It was not the time to point out the obvious to my father, who was ready to haul the entire washing machine, its cooling water, and its nonresponsive engine to the gulley out in the back forty, to be forgotten along with other assorted junk that had accumulated there. In this darkest moment, when consensus seemed to gather that this week’s washing would have to be done the old-fashioned way, with washboard and tub, the machine uttered a lonely pop—feeble evidence of life, but enough to give Pa new vigor and enthusiasm for the challenge at hand. The next push of the kick-start lever produced a succession of pops and an enormous cloud of stinky black smoke that poured out of the exhaust pipe and fouled the air.

“We got the bugger going!” Pa exclaimed, shifting from cussing to polite displeasure.

Ma added more hot water to the machine, its agitator now sloshing back and forth. She began shaving small pieces of Aunt Louise’s homemade soap into the churning water, creating considerable foam. Soon Ma tossed in the long underwear and other less dirty clothing, such as our school clothes, socks and shirts, and her things. After each batch of clothes had an opportunity to come into contact with Aunt Louise’s powerful soap and be agitated by the machine, now popping confidently along, Ma ran the clothes through the wringer and into one of the tubs of rinse water.

She finished with the filthy barn overalls. When everything had been soaped, agitated, rinsed, and run through the wringer a couple of times, Ma gathered up the basket of her hard work and marched out to the clotheslines: several wires strung between two wooden crossbars. Shoveling out the ground under the clotheslines was one of my chores, a job I did late Sunday.

On a cold winter day, especially with a stiff breeze from the northwest, the lightweight items, such as socks and shirts, dried quickly, but the long underwear and the bib overalls froze stiff. By late afternoon, Ma gathered up the dry and frozen clothes and carried them in the house to complete the drying process. She stood the frozen long underwear and the stiff big overalls around the kitchen so they would melt and eventually dry.

Upon arriving home from school on a cold Monday afternoon, my brothers and I were greeted by what appeared to be a roomful of visitors, all standing quietly around the kitchen, stiff as boards, with no heads, arms, or feet. It was something to see. I wanted to go up and ask them what they thought of winter or how they thought the war was going. By the time my chores were done and we boys had gathered around the radio for the afternoon radio sagas designed just for kids, the stiff visitors were beginning to slowly collapse, each eventually becoming a little pile of damp cloth. Ma gathered up the crumpled laundry and hung it on a folding wooden drying rack to finish drying.

After Pa finished the barn chores that afternoon, he hauled the washing machine and rinse tubs back to the woodshed. He pushed the kitchen table back in place and hung the copper boiler on its nail in the woodshed. The entire process would be repeated again the next Monday and every Monday throughout the long winter.

In spring, summer, and fall the washing machine remained in the woodshed and Ma did the washing there. The little Briggs & Stratton engine started with little effort during these warmer seasons. It obviously had no love for winter.