November 15, 1979
My washer and dryer are both suffering from some disease known to us mere humans as old age.
They moan and groan and threaten to quit every time I shovel another ton of laundry inside them but so far, it’s just been idle threats.
One of these days they’re going to just lay down and die.
Then I’ll have to ask someone where the nearest washer/dryer cemetery—better known as the city dump—is and give them a proper fare-thee-well. They’ve been faithful servants!
The first washer we ever bought was during our poverty-stricken college days.
We only got potatoes to go with our beans every other week and I was expecting our first child.
My grandmother knew how clumsy I was so she decided that rather than have me scald myself and probably the baby both to death trying to do diapers on a rub board—we certainly couldn’t afford trips to the laundromat—she’d finance a washer for us!
We’d only had the wonder working beauty a few weeks when my sister came to visit me.
Just before she went to bed one night she decided to play a cute little prank on the guy who roomed and boarded with us!
Charley Driggers was a fine young man, but he was just as ornery as any two people ought to be and he’d been playing some really good jokes on us.
At any rate, she put his ONLY pair of shoes in the washer.
The next morning was the usual state of chaos.
Charles, my husband, was trying to cram for an eight o’clock exam, while poor old Drig was searching frantically for his shoes so HE could go to his seven o’clock class!
I certainly didn’t know where his shoes were!
I had something else to worry about—my new washer, in which I’d just thrown a stack of dirty clothes, was going kla-klunk, kla-klunk, klaklunk!
In the midst of all the noise my sister awoke from her never-never slumber land to the music of my sick washer. She heard me ranting and raving about the washer going out and Drig STILL hunting those shoes! To say the least she put two and two together and miraculously came up with four.
We retrieved the waterlogged but clean shoes, tried to dry them on the oven door and sooth her embarrassment all before class time in less than fifteen minutes.
Drig was wonderful! He came home from school and announced that he was GLAD it had happened.
All the girls noticed him that day—he was the only one who went SLISH-SLOSH down the halls!
And I was certainly one relieved woman to find THAT washer was still healthy! !!