Pa’s Shop

Pa’s Shop

My grandpa had a “shop”—a storage shed that he built on the back of his lot before he built the house in front. It held his carpenter tools and his fishing nets. But it was also the home of Grandmother’s wringer washing machine, a giant round machine that plugged into the electric socket hanging down on a cord from the rafters. Grandmother would have to stand on her tippy toes to reach the socket, all the while telling me, a very impressionable four year old that the electricity cord and socket were very dangerous and I should never touch either of them. Somehow I eventually outgrew that admonition and today I can plug any appliance into a wall socket. I’m not sure about one that hangs from the rafters, though.

But, she said, the really dangerous part of this washing machine is the Wringer. And she’d flip the toggle switch that started the two rolling pins of the wringer moving toward each other. She’d dip her arm down into the rinse water in the round tub and pull up a sheet or a pair of Pa’s work pants. “Now watch what this wringer does to this sheet,” she’d say, “and just imagine what it could do to your baby fingers.” I’d hold my fingers close together and put my hands between my legs and lock my knees together. There would be no danger of my baby fingers getting anywhere close to that wringer. But then I would watch in fascinated horror as Grandmother would put each piece of wash through the tight lips of the wringer, water coming out one side and crushed garment on the other. She didn’t seem afraid, but she was grown-up.

I can still hear the sound of the electric motor on the wringer, and the splash of water falling back into the tub, and see how towels and shirts and underwear looked landing on the little shelf on the other side, all crumpled and flat. And how dry they already felt when Grandmother shook them out and hung them on the clothesline in the yard outside the shop. I get a little whiff of that memory when I take clothes out of the washer to put in the dryer. And I’m always very careful not to get my fingers near any moving parts.