What is this bluing?
10:07 p.m.
When I was a kid, there weren’t sewers yet in our neighbourhood. Instead, there were ditches that ran along both sides of the street, and the non-toilet runoff came out of drain pipes and flowed into them. The other effluent went through the sump pump into the backyard through a set of conduits called weeping tiles. But I digress.
Every Monday the ditches were filled with blue, sudsy water. This was when moms stayed home and raised families, and Monday was laundry day. I remember my mother adding a product to the rinse water when she washed the whites, especially linens, called bluing. It came in a bottle or in a cube, and it got the whites really white. No one uses this stuff anymore, although a woman I asked in choir today said it might still be available.
Well, this thought of bluing was connected to the whole idea of Monday laundry. Those were the days of the wringer washing machine, a tub with an agitator in it and a wrangle above, through which the mom would feed the laundry to extract the moisture. It was a long, drawn out process requiring hours of intensive labour. Then she'd hang the wrung laundry on the line, and probably iron it as well after it was dry.
I don’t do that. I put everything into an automatic washing machine, place the things I want fluffed up in the dryer for 10 minutes (towels and cotton shirts), then hang everything on the line. The hanging and removing of things from the line is the most time-consuming part of it, but it’s really the only housework I enjoy. There’s an almost meditative quality about being outside in the fresh air with birdsong and Suzie, hanging clothes, and not being bothered by people for those short periods.
When winter comes and I can no longer go outside to hang laundry, I resent doing it. Weird, that.
Anyway, as I was saying, human beings go to great lengths and expend an inordinate amount of effort and energy to create devices that will keep them from doing exactly that. Sloth is responsible for invention and innovation, and we’ve gotten so good at saving time and energy, that we hardly need to do anything physical anymore to achieve our ends. When I was a child, the future was supposed to be a great time of leisure because machines, including robots, would do all the work. This hasn’t happened. Instead, we have more time to do more work so we can pay for all our labour-saving devices.
Because we don’t have to run after our food, or walk great distances to gather it, we have become fat and out of shape. The food we don’t need to chase is prepackaged, precooked, prepared and presented to us with a minimum of effort on our part to obtain it. The fattening of America is a perfect example of how successful we have become in reaching our slothful ideals.
I will not get rid of my washing machine, nor my dishwasher, nor my other various appliances. I have gone back to baking bread the old-fashioned way, and I’m trying to walk where I have to go instead of taking the car. But it’s so tempting to take the easy way out. I’m only human, after all.
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