By Kerri Havnen Gordon

However much I dislike doing laundry, it is a breeze compared to what my mother went through to keep our family in clean clothes. She did not have a sparkling large-capacity, front-loading washer called the Neptune. Nor did she have a matching dryer with myriad settings. And in my childhood home, there was no laundry room with a skylight to brighten the chore.

Nonetheless, my mom likely felt as if she had it made, because she was the proud owner of a modern washing machine on wheels. On washday, Mom would roll the machine out of a nearby closet and into the kitchen, where she attached a hose from the washer to the kitchen faucet. Another hose pumped the dirty water from the machine into the kitchen sink. The washer only held the equivalent of about four towels, but my mom loved it.

We had no dryer, so in the winter my mom jury-rigged a half-dozen clotheslines across the dining room and lined the floor with towels to soak up the drips. Summer was much easier when we hung the clothes on lines strung between three large trees in our backyard. At the end of the day, we would bury our faces into the clean, dry, neatly folded stack of sheets. There’s nothing quite like the smell of clean laundry just down from the line.

Perhaps my mother thought of her own mother on washdays. Grandma Loraine had an “agitator” which spared her from washing clothes by hand. This was a blessing because my grandmother and her sister were responsible for washing mounds of sheets and towels generated by the 18 or so guest rooms in our family’s summer lakeside resort.

When the guests left after Sunday supper, all the women and girls in the family would strip the guest beds, remove the towels hanging from hooks and lug the linens to the hotel basement. After running the wash through the agitator, we fed the sheets and towels through the giant wringer. And then, just like at my mom’s house, we strung the sheets and towels across the lines in the back yard. For 80 years, four generations of females, starting with my great-grandmother and ending with me, performed this ritual.

In my grandmother’s later years, she likely remembered her own mother doing laundry and struggling with the old washboard. Grandma Loraine still used her mother’s washboard on occasion, but she must have felt grateful for the agitator and wringer that came after her own mother’s time.

It is interesting how some things change with the times, while others remain just the same. I recently received an email from the man who now lives in my grandparents’ lakeside log house in Wisconsin. The e-mail included two pictures of a half-dozen tulips, all vividly striped in yellow and pink. They were exquisite. The caption read, “In all likelihood, your grandmother planted these tulips, found 20 feet from the house.”

In honor of my grandmother, I will plant similar bulbs in my own yard. Washdays may have evolved beyond anything my grandmother could have imagined, but the visual of planting tulip bulbs is much the same - two women digging little holes with well-used spades, muddying our knees and wiping our brows. Like Grandma, I will plant them “20 feet from the house.”

As mothers, our job is to take care of our families. We do laundry using whatever technology is available to us. We plant tulips, simply because they are pretty, and we sow plenty of love to go around. Just like our moms before us. Happy Mother’s Day.

Gordon writes The Living Experiment monthly for the Town Crier. E-mail: livingexperiment@pacbell.net