DEIRDRE MAULTSAID

Washerwomen, Blessings

1. Catherine Parr Trail, in The Backwoods of Canada I am a washerwoman standing on unstable said that the process of making ground. soap was "mysterious" and a recipe that I see all in its proper place: aquifer, granite, dust, required a certain touch. How sweet the sideyard, water pump, washerwoman with her Castile soap for the lace a basin full, my own brawny arms, and her hard-working lye for the my -abraded hands still wringing. britches and rags and flannels. Work is its own reward. Be Careful: contemplation could bring grief. 4. The world is. Statistics Canada has a study, "Households The world does not know me. unpaid work: measurement and valuation" (Catalogue No. 13-603-MPE95003.) 2. www.statcan.ca Ada Williams, says of her work, "The summer I is subject to public scrutiny. was 15, I went up to Halifax and earned a few dollars. I found a job doing 5. housework, where I had to wash a huge Last century, a bride was instructed in Mountain pile of clothes every day while the mistress sat Life and Work to wash the clothes and watched me. I stood it for one thus: "1. bild a fire in back yard to heat kettle of week, and left. She refused to pay me anything rain water. 2. set tubs so smoke and was very angry. I went down to won't blow in eyes if wind is pert. 3. shave one the waterfront and got on Cat Weston's vessel hole cake soap in bilin water. 4. sort and started for home.. .Iwalked things, make three piles, one pile white, one down home in the thick fog, and went in the cullord, one work britches and rags. 5. house just as Papa was having his stur flour in cold water to smoothe then thin breakfast. "I had to come home, Papa," I said. down with bilin water. 6. rub dirty spots "The work was so hard and I was on bord, scrub hard, then bile, rub cullord but homesick." "Come in child. Come in," he said. don't bile just rench and starch. 8. "We mine as well starve together." spred tee towels on grass; hang old rags on (Beth Light & Joy Parr, Editors, Canadian Women fence; pore rench water in flower bod; on the Move, 1867-1 920, New scrub porch with soapy water. 9. turn tubs Hogtown Press, 1983). upside down. 10. go put on clean dress, smooth hair with side combs, brew cup of tee, 3. set and rest and rock a spell and In pioneer communities, washing clothes count blessins." involved hauling water, a two day soak 6. with vinegar or buttermilk to take out , What layered meaning in layered aprons. rubbing the clothes vigorously on the washboard, boiling them and hanging them out 7. to dry in all weather, Rumour has it I perceive the world in its otherness, that Frontiersmen took baths at the laundry and its pulse, its it-ness, bathhouses, in the East Kootenay its ellipses, waysides and vacancies, Mountains, in the early 19001s,but would have broken shards and muscularity, to wait days for their clothes to oh, its stomped thistles, its unrelenting waves of dry. Women made their own lye out of wood wheat, ash and bones, or animal fat. its crammed up sweaty pioneer dread,

208 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIESILES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME anguished tears in the outhouse. turnaround, with its same road-salt- What can I give? sickened pine trees, (dry and forgotten and I separate darks from whites. carport-threatening), the same tedium I scour. of scruffy volunteer rosehips in the ditches, the Sweeten. boring lack of wildlife, and the silence of God. 8. Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, says "In the 10. midst of a gentle rain while these Female nature is a truth hiding its own thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of invention. Women's work is not natural, but such sweet and beneficent society in becomes a burnt stew, a short walk on stolen Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and time, a forgotten dishcloth on the in every sound and sight around my clothesline. house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere 11. sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages Assemble a decoration, a tiara, a of human neighbourhood animal of words; insignificant, and I have never thought of them hang out a long line of white laundry. since. Every little pine needle Sweeten this scene. expanded and swelled with sympathy and Wring this out. befriended me." Judge the sloshing and sluicing before it judges you. 9. Count blessins. 6:06 a.m., after the first load is sloshing in the washer, I walk along the familiar 12. short piece of road, past the usual sight of the Think of all the pioneer girls I miss. two men who unplug, then warm up Think of how they please me with their frippery. their truck before heading to their shift at the Don't they make lace with such devotion? lumber mill, past the same trailers Such white patterns with the all-year Christmas lights (red and green of closure and convergence and conformity. only), the same piles of real Girls finish tasks; they have crafts and rituals firewood and old lumber (second choice that will not bend, will not break, firewood), past the same grime and that are doubled and comforting and encircling. unloved gravel (no matter how sideways I look Inside out bags for the clothespegs through my own snow-covered Lists of detergent, pitiless soap, , cleaner. lashes at the new drifts that soften the view May they clean away the anguish. along the road), while I hear the Think of all the girls who pass. undernourished dogs barking from the ends of Hold onto the jump rope. their taut ropes, and hear the trucks Hold onto the fringe of your friend's skirt. from Alaska and Prince Rupert idling at the Hold onto the hair of that girl next to you in brake check, and I see the truckers your naked dream. relieving themselves into the ravine, where they The lace cannot comfort you, carve the same caked snow, and only language, the same barnacles of old ice, and then, I walk only the protein of love, until 1come-oh, the teeth-grinding only the horizon toward which you run, strong- lack of possibilities-to the familiar cul-de-dac thighed,

VOLUMES 22, NUMBER 3,4 boots thrown down in a wet coulee, apron gone, Everything that rises. stockings discarded for a fox nest, All that knows. garter belt ripped off and still flying into the Women are a sea of power, blue. not the long-suffering A pioneer trail. points of power's application Monday washday. against us. Count Blessins. We are not the rags to be wrung. Water, we rise. 13. The world does not know me. 16. No pine tree sympathizes, Make my human experience break beyond my its scent a purposeful balm. skin. I wash. The world travels on its moist blue arc; the bay The clothes will flap in the breeze. glows; the sheets flutter. The sheets make a schooner on a bay of golden I inhale. sheaves. The girls have washed so many linens. So? Make me thank them. I see and walk on. Bless their rough hands. Only. 14. Hold. This is not my contemplation. I do not spiritually attune myself to the irreducible complexity in each droplet of water. The world is where I left it: clean, sullied, sorted, unsorted, with its tired cracked ice, unblessed knuckles, random water sprays, sometimes, sometimes footloose giddy grooming. The thistles grow, the lace becomes yellowed, even if I do not reflect. Deirdre Maultsaid's work has been published in Other What do I know? Voices, Zygote and a Rowan Books anthology, and on What do I know that I know? the lnternet at: Conspire (U.S.), The Barcelona Review Be careful of what I see in my knowing, (Spain),The Southern Cross Review (Argentina),The with its soured rationality, Danforth Review (Canada), and others. She is currently deadened intuition. revising a novel and writing a book of creative essays. She How fragile are we, how will we endure, how lives in Burnaby, BC. storied and truthful is the world, is this drop of water. Scoured is silence. My soliloquy.

15. All washing is servile. All reliance is slavery. Is all suffused with Nature's power? Contemplation is a social practice that claims: God is here if we listen. I hear the rustle as the fox sniffs the girl's apron. I hear the waves lapping.

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIESILES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME