Free The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald

lunch. I washed the lunch dishes and pulled a dead leaf off my kitchen geranium and it was five o'clock and time for dinner. Everyone else in the mountains had dinner at eleven in the morning and supper at five in the evening, but dinner at night was, to me, the last remnant of my old civilized life and I clung to it like a Southern girl to her accent. Even though we had it at five instead of seven-thirty and it was as leisurely as choking down a hot dog at a football game and our conversation consisted chiefly of "Pass the pickles," it was dinner at night.
    Another misconception of farm life I had gleaned from books was that winter was a time of neighborliness. In spring and summer we were too tired at the end of the day to do anything but fall into bed, but I imagined that winter evenings would be filled with neighborly gatherings, popping corn, drinking hot coffee, talking politics and crops. How wrong I was. Winter was a time for ordinary chores which took ten times as long to perform because everything was cold and wet and dark and the neighboring farmer's one idea was to get the damn things done so he could go in where it was warm and stay put. The farmer's wife followed the same pattern for winter working that I did, which occupied her for twelve to eighteen hours a day and was roughly as follows:
    Monday—Washday! Washing was something that the mountain farm women had contests doing to see who could get it on the line first Monday morning. All except me. I had a contest with myself to see how long I could put off doing it at all. I attacked my washing with the same sense of futility I would have had in attempting to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Bob had been a Marine in World War I and instead of being shell-shocked he carried home a fixation that a helmetful of water was enough to wash anything, including blankets, and on Monday morning he would say cheerfully at breakfast, "Going to wash today?" and I would answer hopefully, "Yes, and it's going to be a HUGE ENORMOUS washing!" And so Bob would go whistling down through the orchard to the spring and bring back about four tablespoonfuls in the bottom of each bucket and then disappear into the woods where he remained incommunicado until lunch. A few times I left the washing until after lunch but learned that a sufficiency of water does not compensate for having to straddle clothes baskets and wash boards while cooking dinner or having to leave the warm house and hang out wet clothes in the dark. So I carried 99 per cent of my wash water and if I was able to get it hot and could scrub the clothes clean they never dried in winter, so what?
    Also the water was so hard it should have been chipped out of the spring and even when mixed 40-60 with soap produced nothing but a greasy scum and after a day spent scrubbing clothes in that liquid mineral I could peel the skin off my hands like gloves.
    I entered all of the soap contests in the vain hope that I would win $5000 and never have to use theirs or any other washing powder again as long as I lived. I failed to understand why farm wives were always talking about the sense of accomplishment they derived from doing a large washing. I would have had a lot more feeling of accomplishment lying in bed while someone else did the washing.
    Tuesday—Ironing! Ironing with sad irons has nothing at all to do with preconceived ideas about ironing. It is a process whereby you grab a little portable handle and run over to the stove and plug it into an iron which is always covered with black. Then you run back to the ironing board and get black on your clean pillowcase. You take the iron over to the sink and wipe it off and it is of course too cool, by now, to do any good to the dirty pillowcase so you put it back on the stove and repeat the process until your husband comes in and wants to know where in HELL his lunch is.
    Bob was irritatingly casual about my washing and ironing and was continually putting on clean clothes, when he