A long, hard Winter will have you not only actively wishing, but dreaming about Summer.

You don’t always need a Winter, though, do you?

Growing up was always one of the greatest times of the year wasn’t it? For me, it meant that we could spend a whole week at my grandparents WITHOUT my brothers and sister.

I was King for a week during that time. I always got to pick the menu for the week, and lima beans wasn’t on it. I could pick out the flavor of ice-cream I liked the best and if I wanted to, I could stay up and watch Johnny Carson.

I always took the opportunity to tell my grandmother what terrible people my parents were; why they made me take out garbage, put my clothes in the hamper, make my bad and even had the audacity to make me do the dishes from time to time.

I remember asking my grandmother what terrible things her parents made her do, and she would tell me it was many, many tasks too horrible to describe, but one in particular, doing the family wash, was the worst because they didn’t have a wash machine. My grandmother would have to haul the family laundry into town, wait while it was being done, and then have to come home afterwards; an all day event, she bemoaned.

She told me she’d remembered very vividly when their neighbor was drafted into the war and he boarded up the house and moved his family in with the in-laws and asked my great-grandparents if they’d be so kind as to take care of some of the things they were leaving behind. Wouldn’t you know, one of them was their wash machine. It’s the kind you actually find out on the back porch of an antique store, the one with the tumbler and wringer. She even proudly displayed a nasty scar on her hand where she’d actually got it caught in the wringer.

She said, chasing that old wash machine across their dirt basement floor as it would shake, shimmy, spit, and spew suds all over the place was a kind of peace on earth–besides she could now do the family wash at her convenience and not for a whole Saturday.

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