Washday!

Mondays were traditionally known as washday in the Western world. Sundays were the dress-up church days, the days to feast, and for those in domestic work (wives, daughters, servants), everything from table linens to undies got the treatment in the kitchen on Mondays. With everything being done by hand, and water heated on the woodstove, it was a much different process than it is now. 

Thank God, ingenuity, and capitalism that we don't have to do it that way anymore. 

Some people still hate dealing with laundry, and I can understand that. If you have to fetch the teens' perilously odiferous clothes from all over the room -- God forbid they should use the hamper -- you might resent the work, and you might almost wish for the old laundry pot on the woodstove, because at least you could boil the stink out of Junior's socks. 

If you have to use a Laundromat, or a communal laundry in your building or complex, you might also find it a heinous chore, stuck outside the home with anyone wandering by to watch you fold your unmentionables. My first apartment was a mother-in-law type arrangement that actually had a washer and dryer, but when the landlord threw me out to get his actual mother-in-law in the place, my next bachelor pad had no such amenity. I had to take my clothes down to one of the local laundries and sit there while they went round and round.

Except for the schlepping, it wasn't so bad, though. I'd go on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, when nothing much was going on. It was quiet enough so I could read there. During baseball season I could run across the street to a bar and watch the ball game for a while. But I had to make sure I got back before my quarters ran out. Once in a while someone comes up with the bright idea to open a combination laundry/bar, but we never had one where I lived in the city. 

I like doing laundry now. I have a washer and dryer off the kitchen, not downstairs in the unfinished crypt, and let's face it -- this is one chore now where the machine does most of the work. If I had a machine that could clean my refrigerator, I would be using it every week.