It looks like our ideal Maine summer weather is about to explode into beastliness. By Wednesday temperatures will climb into the high 80s and 90s, and my sweet temperate flower garden will start to fry. Ugh.

Well, at least we have a couple of respite days before Hades arrives. For now the grass and garden are in good shape, and yesterday I even managed to talk myself into washing windows, a chore I particularly dislike. So today I'll get my weekly housework done, run errands, keep pulling materials together for Monson, and otherwise prepare for deserting my household post.

Last week I received a request from a poet wanting permission to reprint my poem "A History of Wash Day" in a column she writes for a midcoast newspaper. She asked if I could also add a few words about how the poem was made? Sure, I said, and without thinking overly hard about the matter scribbled down a couple of sentences about housework, which quickly became a couple of paragraphs, which quickly became way more text than the poet could possibly fit into a little newspaper column. Clearly I have a lot to blab about housework. That poem, in fact, was supposed to be an essay--at least that was my intention when I did the research behind it. I've never been clear, given my volubility on the subject, why the piece insisted on reducing itself to lines. But the mysteries of poems are never-ending.

A History of Wash Day

 

Dawn Potter

Sunday night you sort the clothes, whites from greens,

browns from red, and now by fabric—woolen or linen?

cotton or silk?—and were they smudged in the pew,

 

or fouled in the barn? Soak overnight (bucket after bucket

from the dooryard pump), each pile in its own

watery tub, then rest yourself (nurse a baby, darn a sock)

 

so that on Monday, at dawn (corset pinching your lungs),

you can turn your thoughts to draining your first tub: a heap

of pale church attire (lye soap glistens in an oily basin).

 

Pour in hot suds (stove ablaze with wood lugged

before daybreak), and scrub each foaming bodice

against the washboard (knuckles scraped raw).

 

Wring out the garments, rub fresh soap on stubborn filth,

heave the sodden mess into the cauldron on the stove, 

(kitchen pulsing with heat), add water (bucket after bucket

 

from the dooryard pump), and boil it up (steam thick as night).

Rest (nurse a baby, fry meat for men), then dip the clothes

out of the boiler (burn yourself), rub dirty spots again

 

(will soap supply last till butchering time?), rinse load in plain water

(bucket after bucket from the dooryard pump), wring out clothes,

rinse in a tub of bluing (store-bought bottle is running low), twist dry,

 

then mix up a tin pan of starch water, dip each item (nurse

the screaming baby), wring once more, hang clothes on the line

in the dooryard till they are perfectly dry

 

and repeat every step on every heap of garments, in this order:

darker, coarser, dirtier. Life could be harder.

You could live in the city, begin every work week of your life

 

lugging gallons of water through horseshit, across glare ice,

up five narrow flights of a tenement. Maybe you wash 

for eight sloppy sons, a pair of dying incontinent parents,

 

five or six live-in boarders, or an owner who whips you

when you overlook a cherry stain. On your knees by the tub,

you scrub out brick dust and urine; you line-dry your sheets

 

in a breeze thick with soot.  How much coal must a woman carry

(oh, the price of coal!) to keep her stove hot enough to boil a lake

of wash-water in a single day?  What of the baby (scooting

 

across the kitchen floor)? What of you

(weighted with baskets, blinded by steam)?

What of duty (monstrous, eternal)?

 

No time to pray. Tomorrow is ironing day.

[from Calendar (Deerbrook Editions, 2024)]