Hingin’ Out the Clothes

Hingin’ Out the Clothes

Down by the River
Where the green grass grows
There sits Mary, washing her clothes.
She sings she sing she sings so sweet,
she calls her friends all up and down the street.*

I expect Mary curses or bawls,
When it rains or snows?
Wouldn’t you?

Hark
Hear her,
muscle and strength in rhythmic industry
hands, arms, shoulders elbows
in service to others.

30 mins in water you have these!
washer woman’s hands
are not nice!

Wash house women undertaking laundry in the company of other washing women.

I guess your mother grandmother great grandmother or someone in your family is likely to have been too a washhouse woman at home, if not you.
Did they get you to join in?
Like my mother got me and my sisters to join her?
The boys, my brothers didn’t have to be washhouses.
This was girls work training for women-hood,
Muscle and strength in rhythmic industry.
Rub and scrub with household soap,
Sunlight oh! That smell of lemons! or green block soap,
soak and rinse, squeeze.

Imagine my nine-year-old little hands in a basin balanced on a wooden plank across the bath washing my own clothes.

‘Not like that Rosie!’
She would scold me. Boy my mother could wring water out of clothes.

Inside out, upside down
they would be hinged on the line to dry.

She would frown my mother.
She grew not much higher than my 9- year- old self.
But her presence keenly felt,
rectifying my errors in the hingin’ out clothes
I can see her now: peg ready in her vexed mouth,
she’d temporarily remove to scold me.

Pegs were rhythmically removed from the large pocket in
an apron she’d made,
a speedy conveyor belt in her one-woman laundry operative,
placing, replacing pegs, from pocket, to hand, to mouth and line.

She’d select a clothes item, lift it out from the laundry basket, inside out, buttoned up, and hung upside down.
The sheets had a special pegging arrangement,
and hung so well to let the air circulate,
in her hingin’ out of the clothes ritual.

So here I am wearing this apron to remember her by
without the peg pockets. Neither did I make it.
‘Sorry Ma!’

Ros