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by Jessie Van Eerden
In summer I caught the towels beneath the lip of the wringer and dropped them into a Rubbermaid laundry basket like limp fish into a bucket. The towels had swished around the agitator in the belly of the Speed Queen washer, a big white pail of suds on four legs, its wringer sticking up like a crooked arm, a drain pipe snaking down its side. My mother pulled the towels from their rough bath and fed them through the yellow cylinders of the wringer into the rinse tub, careful of her fingers, and then adjusted the wringer two notches toward me and sent the towels through again, from the rinse water to my waiting hands and my basket. The towels, then the denims, then the thin pillowcases I had to coax. I held them just long enough to smell myself up with Tide and wrinkle my young skin, then dropped my catch to the basket to be carried out to the clothesline. And all summer Mom kept saying we used the old Speed Queen instead of an automatic toploader because it was easier on well-water, wouldn’t run us dry, since we could do twelve loads in the same water bath and not have to run fresh water for each. But it was a drought summer, and in early fall when the air got chilly enough to dry the towels stiff as leather, the well ran dry anyway.
She drove us in the truck out to Beatty Church and we filled milk jugs at the hand pump, the same place we got water for a foot-washing or a baptism at Beatty. I remember the ways we used the jugged water that first night, in particulars, for we had to be sparing. In a shallow sink, we washed the eggs just laid by the hens, scrubbing loose the clods of shit and sawdust, and I had my mouth washed out with water and soap when I called it shit on the eggs and not manure, and my sister heated water on the stove to clean our faces with before bed. The water made itself holy because of those particulars.
I cried on our third dry day, but Mom said that once, when we were babies, she ran out of cloth diapers, so she took the ones only peed in and hung them out to dry on the line, not because the well had gone dry but because she was too worn-out to run them through a wash. She hung them out tinged yellow, dry soon enough. And it wasn’t so bad, so we’d be fine. The rain would come, the water table would rise.
And when we hauled the pump’s water again from the truck to the basement, and the gallon jugs hung heavily in both my hands, I learned that water could be as heavy as stones, and that you had to wait, sometimes for days, for the world to be renewed.
A West Virginia native, Jessie van Eerden holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her essays have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Geez Magazine, and Bellingham Review, as well as a few other journals. She is currently working on a novel and teaching writing as the Milton Fellow with IMAGE and Seattle Pacific University. She and her husband Mike have spiritual roots in a tiny Mennonite fellowship in Indiana, a group that eats soup and bread together after worship each week, and they are seeking such a community in their new home city, Seattle.
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Issue #6 