Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>Nostalgia is nice. Electricity is better.

>Who on this list would happily wash clothes by hand?


Like several who have already responded, we did laundry by hand for a good 
while.  Somewhere I have the picture of the huge galvanized tub on the wood 
stove with the wringer bolted to it.

The consternation over such simplification comes from mixing metaphors.  At 
the time when clothes were washed by hand with water drawn from the well or 
spring, people owned two or three changes of clothes and washed one of them 
once  
a week or so.  With the advent of  automatic washing machines and clothes 
dryers, our opinion of what constituted clean clothes changed.  In the modern 
suburbian lifestyle the family will typically shower in the morning, change 
into 
clean clothes for the day, then after school or work perhaps shower again and 
change into clean clothes.  Then all those clothes, towels, and perhaps 
bedding will be washed and dried and put away.  The modern looks at that 
mountain of 
laundry and says, "Do that by hand??!  Those people back then must have been 
miserable!!"



You don’t hear this so much now of days but once we were admonished to ‘mind 
our p’s and q’s’ and the origin of that term was guessed to be the fact that 
a p and a q were mirror images of each other and could be confused in 
writing.  Not likely.  During colonial times drinks in public houses was 
taxed by the 
serving.  When a patron came in alone, the barkeep would draw him a pint.  
But when two came in together, he drew them a quart and they shared the 
single 
tankard.  I once listened to an unenlightened historian opine that those 
people 
must have drunk a lot back then judging from the number of half-gallon and 
gallon steins that survived.  Maybe, but the purpose of those half-gallon 
steins 
was to serve drink at a table of four patrons who would share the single 
vessel.

This is wandering afield but the favorite fast food of the day was a tankard 
of toasted bread covered with beer.  The patrons were literally drinking a 
toast.

The Nearings, certainly not foodies by any means, ate every meal from a 
single wooden bowl (per person) and chopsticks.  How much trouble would it 
have 
been to clean up after that??  



The word ‘supper’ comes from the custom of having the main meal of the day 
as a serving of bread which was broken into pieces and dipped into a common 
trencher of ‘sop’.  The drink was served in common pitcher which was used for 
drinking from rather than pouring from.

So the horror of simplifying ones life as is being discussed here arises from 
taking a 21st century fastidiousness and applying it to a pre-fossil fuel way 
of doing things.  There’s a happy medium somewhere along the way.



Any type of hand labor done in the proper context moves into the background 
noise quickly.  When we want cornbread with breakfast (grilled corn cakes), 
someone wanders yawning to the crib, gets a couple ears of corn, shells them, 
grinds them, and mixes up the batter.  It's such second nature to all of us, 
no 
one thinks twice about it.  People visiting stare slackjawed, "All that to 
just 
get bread for breakfast!  That is realy too much, I could never do that."  
Yet no one here thinks any more of it than making coffee or washing their 
hands 
or any other task that fades into the background.
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