Froze Clothes

Canadian Entertainment

Winter has come to our corner of Canada.

Winter with a vengeance.

We’ve received a foot of snow in the past two days.

A curtain of the stuff is forming off the side of the garage.

Perfect!

And, oddly enough, it makes me think of laundry.

Laundry?!

Maybe I should explain . . .

During Mom’s very early years, growing up on a farm in Central Alberta, she and her mother did the laundry on a scrub board.

And dried it on the line.

Finally, they graduated to laundry cleaned in a miraculous new wringer washer.

But still dried on the line.

This made for some . . . entertaining times when cold weather hit.

On laundry day, Mom and Grandma would dutifully lug the heavy baskets of wet laundry out to the line to hang.  

In the parched winter air, they dried completely.

But froze solid during the process.

This is where the fun part came in.

Mom and Grandma would haul in the frozen sheets and overalls and underwear and stand them up against the walls in the kitchen and front room.

As the clothes thawed, they . . . crumpled.

Finally, when they were lying on the floor, they were ready to fold and put away.

Who needs modern electronics?

With only a wringer washer, a clothes line and a cold snap, you can have clean clothes and entertainment all in one process.

Genius.