The Unending Task

       More Letters From Paradise
           The Unending Task

Prehistoric Man covered himself and herself with the skins of animals. This was because  skins provided warmth and protection from the weather. But with the birth of spinning and weaving, laundry was also born.
Washing clothes is never very much fun. During some periods of history, it was even ignored. Some fellow whose name I have forgotten wrote that the people living in the Palace of Versailles, at the court of King Louis XIV smelled very bad. In fact they stank. They covered themselves with perfume to cover the smell. They didn't bathe, and neither did their clothes get washed.
The English didn't smell very much better. Clothes were seldom washed. It was not very much fun to wash clothes.
I remember seeing women in Mexico washing clothes in a river, and beating them with rocks. The same thing is true today in many  parts of the world.
My earliest association with laundry was as a boy, during WWII. It was my job to empty the washing machine, and the two rise tubs. I would climb the steep basement stairs, and throw the bucket full of water on our Victory garden. This took many trips, and it was the only real work that I did.
The procedure was as I remember, first,  sort the clothes into piles according to color, dark clothes separated from white clothes. I remember sometimes having pink underwear, due to some mistake. The clothes went into the washing machine, where they were moved about by the agetator. Then they were put through a pair of rollers. The clothes went through both rinse tubs, wrung damp-dry and hung up to dry in the basement or the backyard, during good weather. It was always interesting to see frozen pants on the clothes line.
We are so happy that today our machines require less labor. Our washer and dryer are stack units. Washer on the bottom and dryer on the top. But for really big loads of rugs, we use the big machines in the laundry across the street, run by a Vietnamese, who I suspect has turned down the temperature on the dryers, in order to receive more quarters.
There is one solution to solving the problem of laundry. But, going around in the buff is frowned upon, even here in the tropics. And there is also the chance of sunburn and bug bites.  
             Aloha
             Grant