How many Polacks does it take to do the laundry?

It was beautiful this morning. There’s nothing like starting the day by eating fresh croissants, delicious fruit, and hot chocolate at a table outside, overlooking an amazing view, with your family.

But after breakfast it was down to business. We had lots and lots of laundry to do and not a whole lot of French vocabulary – so figuring out the new washing machine was not that easy. There’s a water shortage here as well, so we had to ration our showers in order to get the clothes done.

Now, laundry here is not like laundry in the States. You don’t just run to the basement or bathroom or wherever your washer and dryer is and throw your clothes in, add a little detergent, and come back in a bit to finish it off. Oh no. Here, it’s a process. We have to sort the clothes inside the big house, stuff one load into the only laundry basket, walk across the driveway to the little house, pour the clothes in… and learn French. Everything’s in Celsius, the cycles are different, the soaps come in tablets that we have no idea how to use. It’s just a matter of adjusting, of course, and as my mother and I stood with our clothes in front of the machines, carefully scrutinizing my French dictionary, we felt like two dumb Polacks doing a simple chore in a strange land. Not to mention the dryer has two settings – one for four hours and one for eight.

We did figure out the system and our clothes came out smelling clean and dripping wet, load after load. Because the dryer takes forever and is so small, we did our best to air dry the laundry on the clothes-line with the few clothes pins we could find. And, my mother – being very Polish – refuses to let her clothes have “bibits” (you know, the little marks that the clothes pins leave if you don’t hang them up by the seems?). I’m sure an onlooker would have found it quite humorous to watch my mother and I – the two women – walking in circles around the clothesline (located in the middle of the woods about prickly bushes and dirt – so don’t you dare drop any of your clean, white laundry… like I did…), rearranging articles of clothing so that they all fit and none touched the ground, while my father sat admiring the view or reading books or – if he was feeling productive – making lunch. I became a human drying rack with pants and shirts and towels draped over my outstretched arms, sheets wrapped around my shoulders, a basket of clothespins in one hand and the other occupied by bras and socks. My mother took her sweet time hanging everything up, cursing to herself when my twisty strappy shirts caused problems and having full conversations with her mother (my dead Babci) when she couldn’t figure out how to hang something without leaving those damn bibits. After one particularly verbal conversation, I laughed.

“Well all I can hear is her saying to me, when I was young, ‘Don’t hang those like that, Bernice Joan, or you’ll have to iron it all!’”

It occurred to me as she said that that someday I will probably be standing somewhere on vacation with my hands full of damp clothes, telling my daughter not to hang that like that or she’ll have to iron it all…

It’s amazing how wisdom gets past on.

It’s also amazing how much wisdom there is in the advanced techniques of laundry, particular in the air-drying part.

Long story long, we successfully juggled the clothesline with scattered pins, the dryer with a billion-hour setting, and the washing machine we couldn’t understand so that by mid-afternoon everything was almost clean and dried – or at least drying on the clothesline or in the machine. Then we decided it was time for the beach. My father put down his book and took us to L’Escalet, where we soaked up what was left of the sun and went snorkeling and had a grand old time.

Pizza’s on the way, the sun is setting, and life is wonderful here in Cap Camarat.