Warshing

     One of the sometimes interesting, sometimes tiring aspects of living in Peru without much money or a fancy house is washing laundry by hand. Washing machines exist, of course, but you could probably count the total number in Ollantaytambo on your two hands. Maybe you might need your toes considering most hotels have them for linens. And I can't pretend that I don't sometimes pay by the kilo to have someone else wash my clothes when I'm feeling lazy.  Peruvians ladies who wash by hand are miraculous stain removers but your delicates might not stand up to the stiff brush they use too many times. I've also noticed that most people wash their shoes almost as regularly as their clothes, scrubbing tennis shoes to a like-new shine. It's very impressive.

     So here's my laundry set up. I like Bolivar detergent because of the name. My soap is named after a man who liberated most of South America, how about yours? The most effective and common detergents are the powder kind. Also popular are the solid bars for scrubbing into stains and stinky spots.  My bar is actually old fashioned Fels-Naptha soap imported from America via my parents suitcase. Roommate Jessica turned me onto this stuff because her mom uses it at home. Not to sound too much like a TV spokesman, but stains literally vanish when you rub dampened clothing with Fels-Naptha as a pre-treatment. Apparently, it's been around for over a 100 years and is great for everything from treating poison oak on the skin to grating up and using in a washing machine. Like any soap, it's not completely guilt-free environmentally but these cheap, retro bars will forever replace Shout in my households. (Check out more about it here, here and here.)

     But enough about soap. Of course one also needs a big tub and various containers are helpful for plopping wet clothes anywhere but the dirty cement patio. Last but not least, I've got my yellow "Leonpard" brand scrub brush; also available in a rainbow of other colors. It has a picture of a lion stamped on it and I like to think a Leonpard is an imaginary animal similar to a "Liger" (which is apparently a real (freakishly huge) animal aside from the movie Napoleon Dynamite.)  See evidence of it's existence below.

     But back to laundry. The detergent is strong stuff -- it's got enzymes in it to eat any grime that came from human sources -- and so I usually just dump everything in the tub with ample water, smoosh around to disperse the soap and let soak for at least a day, returning to agitate the mass when I think of it (I imagine I am a washing machine, loosening all the dirt particles like in the commercials). Then it's time to rinse. I plug the big cement sink and rinse batches of clothes in 2-3 changes of water. 

   

     Then, just squeeze and hang to dry. The entire process is really quite a workout for the hands. Mine used to get sore but now they are STRONG although icy cold water can cause a pain all it's own. 

     While hand washing laundry sometimes feels like a sisyphian task, with always one more t-shirt or sock appearing from the murky deep of the washtub, some days it is satisfying. I enjoy the view, I watch my neighbors and their geese over the wall, I imagine that I understand a small, small fraction of the labor and boredom that my namesake felt at home while the men were in the fields. And if I'm feeling even more romantic than that, it reminds me of the Danish girls in My Antonia:

His girls never looked so pretty at the dances as they did standing by the ironing-board, or over the tubs, washing the fine pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat and curling in little damp spirals about their ears. ... When one danced with them, one smelled their clean, freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with rosemary leaves from Mr. Jensen's garden.