April 25, 2007

Clean Laundry as Aromatherapy

Nothing epitomizes the absurdity of modern life quite like the detergent aisle at the supermarket. Looking for something simple and unscented with which to clean my clothes, I ran into a veritable wall of artificial scents packaged in garish plastic bottles, each screaming louder than the other how "natural" they smelled. Aromatherapy has come to the laundry room.

As someone whose favorite smell in the whole world is sun-dried laundry, I have to ask: how did we get to the point where we stopped hanging clothes outside to dry and instead devised a chemical formula to recreate the scent in our gas and electric dryers?

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I come from generations of women to whom laundry is important. My grandmother, my father's mother, had a wringer washer to squeeze the water out of the clothes before she hung them on the line in the back yard. If it was raining on Monday, laundry day, she hung them in the basement. She used to iron her sheets and they smelled like sunshine. She even had a laundry chute in her house and my sister and I spent many an hour dropping foreign objects from the upstairs bathroom down two stories and (clunk!) right into the washer.

My own mother only ironed during the summer. Being a high school teacher, she worked long hours during the school year, grading compositions and making lesson plans every night after dinner. I can't remember what we wore during the winters, but our wardrobes must have been heavy on sweaters and other items that didn't need ironing.

Summers, our dining room turned into a Laundromat. It was my job to dampen the clothes (this was before the steam iron was invented). I would spread them out on the table and sprinkle water from a Coke bottle with a cork stopper with holes in the top. Then I'd roll the clothes up and put them in plastic bags until Mom had time to iron them. I used to sit beside her and listen to the hiss of the iron as we watched "Queen for a Day." Sometimes she would get enthralled with the drama of the show and accidentally scorch something. We always hid the item and swore an oath of secrecy.

When at last I had my own clothesline and avocado green Kenmore washing machine, I did two loads every day. I also had a child whose job it was to dampen the clothes, but he didn't need a Coke bottle. He just peed in them. To this day, I think I chose cloth diapers because they offered more opportunities to smell the sunshine on freshly laundered cotton.

So, here we are today. Nobody has clotheslines, nor do they have backyards to put them in. If you want your clothes to smell like the outdoors, you have to buy sunshine in a bottle on the third shelf, aisle 4. As for me, barring a rain shower on laundry day, I'll be draping our clothes on the porch furniture to dry and thinking about my mother as I do the ironing.