Charley drove our friends to the airport in Marseille at 7:30 am, and I began my long, hot day as a French washerwoman.
Our friends have a laundry room in a “cave,” down through a narrow courtyard between two sections of the house and right next to the other cave that houses their wine cellar. As European laundry facilities go, I definitely can’t complain. “Notre buanderie est superbe”: a large and cool stone room, a relatively-new washing machine, an equally new dryer (unusual in Europe!), a stone sink, a table for folding clothes, an iron and ironing board, and (important!) a large drying rack.
Hard at work in la buanderie
As soon as the car pulled out of the driveway and Kelly and I finished waving goodbye, I started my work. Our friends slept in their beds last night and took their showers this morning, and we planned to move into their rooms tonight. I stripped the beds and gathered up all the towels from their rooms. I went to the gîte where we’ve slept the last three nights, stripped those beds and collected our towels. Our Slow Travel friends Dennis and Gloria are arriving tomorrow for three days, and we want the gîte to be a special place for them.
I also needed to wash most of our family’s clothes. We’ve been hauling around our dirty hiking clothes from the Ireland walk for the past ten days, and we haven’t washed any of our other clothes for over a week. There was a washer in our cottage in Normandy, but we stopped using it the middle of the week when the weather turned drizzly since we didn’t think our clothes wouldn’t have time to dry inside. Now here we are in hot Provence, and I’ve worn the same pair of formerly-white capris for the past three days. This morning I had to sort through the dirty clothes bag to find my least-dirty pair of underwear. Laundry was definitely my priority!
We do have a “cadillac” washing machine here, but it’s also a European machine. The drum holds about half of what we’re used to at home; a full load is a big sheet and three pillowcases. And the wash cycle (even when I press “rapide”) seems to take about an hour.
I ended up with three overflowing laundry baskets of dirty stuff. Where to start? Clean sheets—or clean underwear? A clean pair of capris to wear when I meet Dennis and Gloria—or clean towels for their bathroom?
I started washing the bedding for the big bed. I tried to remember my lesson yesterday on operating the equipment and using the laundry products, and consulted a dictionary to confirm the translation of some of the words on the operating panel. You press “départ” to start the machine; somehow that always makes me think “blast off!”
By the time Charley got back from the airport about three hours later, I had pillowcases hanging on the drying rack in the courtyard, sheets in the dryer, and another load in the wash. Progress!
The initial dryer cycle was 76 minutes. Towels required two cycles.
And then there were the sheets. Our friends have beautiful bed linens. When I took the first sheet out of the dryer, I was shocked. The sheet was a mass of wrinkles, even though I used fabric softener, pressed a button marked “facile” with a picture of an iron, and hadn’t overloaded the dryer. So much for drying the bed linens in the dryer! Even worse, now I needed to iron the heavily-wrinkled top sheets. Ironing sheets is something I’ve never done! After I struggled for 20 minutes with the first sheet, Charley took over. He had a much faster technique. Our friend Lisa has two children. She has a part-time housekeeper (who does a lot of ironing), but I know Lisa spends large amounts of time in this laundry room.
My entire day revolved around the laundry. I ran back and forth between the main house and the laundry room, sweating in the hot sun and 100 temperature, always alert for the possibility of a scorpion. Every three loads I emptied the dryer’s water receptacle, pouring it on the plants in the courtyard as I’d been instructed yesterday. (Water is a precious commodity here.) I did at least ten loads of wash, kept the dryer going non-stop, hung clean laundry on the drying rack, folded clothes and towels, made beds, and ironed more than I have in the past ten years. Since our friends don’t have a clothesline (Charley will be working on this), when the drying rack was full, I used a broom handle in the laundry room to hang socks and draped the sheets over an eight-foot ladder in the sunny courtyard.
Most Americans my age and younger don’t appreciate the ease at which we get clean and wrinkle-free clothes: our large washers with super-fast cycles, dryers that quickly spin our clothes dry while dispensing of the water, the permanent-press fabrics, even reasonably-priced laundries and dry cleaners. But here in France, laundry is still a much more involved process, handicapped by limited space in many old homes and the expense of equipment and electricity. The large, large majority of people here hang their clothes outside to dry and use drying racks.
If I have to spend a day as a washerwoman, at least I'm in France!
At the end of my long day as a French laundrywoman, the Wood family had clean clothes again. The gîte was made up and ready for our guests. And now I’m anticipating sinking into that comfortable big bed in the master suite to savor those freshly laundered and ironed sheets. I think I’ll sleep well tonight!
