Laundry Day

The Namib Desert is enjoying an early-autumn heat wave, and I am not.  Nonetheless, on Sunday I took a deep breath and set to work on the laundry.

This is a standard weekend chore, and it keeps me at home for many hours.  While several of the people I know here have automatic washing machines, that's not the norm.  Most of us use buckets.  I use a bucket and my bathtub, converting the bathroom into a laundry room.

I'll use the same wash water several times, so sorting is important.
Shirts before trousers is my motto!

Mama's Washing Powder and my shower hose generate suds,
and then I swirl everything around and around with my fist,
switching arms 'cause I get tired, to create a washing-machine effect.

After the clothes soak a while, I scrub a bit,
focusing on 'the hot spots,' as V says.
Then I squeeze out the soapy water and toss them
into clean water in the bathtub to rinse, swirling a bit more.

They go out on the line to dry.  This is three buckets' worth of wash at mid-day.

And this is four buckets' worth as the evening draws to a close, which is
happening very early since the clocks changed.  Like, 17H30 sunset.

I scoop up some of the rinse water in my little blue bucket...

...and toss it on the shrubs.
They are doing much better since I started watering them.

A few months back, my fifth or sixth bucket of wash would start to feel exhausting.  (It has been a long time since I had to hike the laundry down four flights to the laundry room, and back up again.  I've actually had - or is this boasting? - in-unit washer/dryer since 2004.)  All the bending, swirling, scrubbing, lifting, squeezing, wringing and carrying still-sopping-wet-despite-all-that-squeezing clothes out to the line, battling the wind to get them pinned down before they flew into the desert sand that hardens to concrete the second it touches a wet shirt -- it just got surprisingly tiring.  Not so much now; I noticed last night that I felt fresh and springy despite the seven or eight buckets of wash.  It was night, you see, and I had swept and mopped and laundered and cleaned the house and my own ferociously filthy self, and the temperature had dropped by about a million degrees.  Out in the desert evening, enjoying the fresh breeze and sunset, a little hand wash feels well worth the effort.