Doing the Wash

Memory from a Maine island some years ago on this Mother's Day

I did the wash today. Not an extraordinary event these days—even for a male. Afterwards, I hung the wash out to dry, something which you do on a small Maine island. What this did, this hanging out of the wash, was give me the sheer satisfaction of completing a domestic task. It’s a domestic task that connects you to the old, simple patterns of life.

But this did something else, something unexpected. It opened a chest-full—or rather a hamper-full—of memories that had been in profoundly deep storage in my heart. It took me back to Virginia Beach, Virginia where I grew up. More specifically, it took me to 1955, to our back yard. And in this backyard, my mother was hanging out the wash, and I was there, watching her. My mother, dead these many years now.

Yes, suddenly, there she was. I was, too. I was myself as a boy. I was watching my mother work. I was watching her doing something she had to do at least three or four times a week. She was hanging out the wash to dry: providing clean clothes for her three children, and for her husband, and for herself. She worked efficiently, reaching above her and pinning the edges of the garments to the clothesline, brushing her rich brown hair away from her face from time to time as she worked. She had two or three wooden pins in her mouth at the ready, replenished steadily from an arsenal in her apron pockets.

She must be thirty-five or thirty-six. She is energetic and beautiful. I want to speak to her, but she doesn’t like talking when she is hanging out the wash. She doesn’t like doing the wash, period. I remember her telling me so, and she wants to finish it as quickly as possible.

Everything about washing clothes and hanging them out to dry in Virginia Beach in 1955 comes back to me on that Maine hill. I know there is a big difference between my hanging out the wash in Maine and my mother’s inescapable routine of long long ago. For her, it was work, pure and simple.

I watched her as long as I could today, my mother, so alive before me I could hardly believe it. I continued watching her as I pinned my clothes to the even more deeply bowing line. I pinned shirts, socks, towels and jeans for my own daughter, and for me. But even then I could see my mother turn and look at me as I extravagantly used two, sometimes three, clothespins for each piece of laundry. “Double up on those clothespins, Richie!” She meant that two pieces of laundry could share the same pin. You get more on the line then, and the hanging will be over faster.

So there she was, my mother, my faraway gone mother. I could see her again as I had as a ten year-old: my coping—not always coping—mother. She, who was to have so many problems and pains later, whose heart was broken and who lost her way. She was mine, and I was hers, for a moment—for an eternity. I think that could only have happened to me here, on this Maine island, where the old verities of life are championed. So, I am grateful to the island for these few moments with her again, for that presence of herself young and strong and beautiful.

Wish you were here.

My mother, holding me when I was 8 weeks old.