The Life & Times of Fairlane

As I have oftentimes mentioned on this blog, when I was growing up my family didn’t have running water (except when it rained), so in turn, we didn’t have many of the amenities that most people take for granted. One of these was an automatic washing machine. Janet, over at Writing in the Blackberry Patch, had a post the other day about old washing utensils, and that inspired me to write this post. You all ought to go read Janet’s post, just click here to do so.

When I was little, Mom carried water from the “crick”, hauling it up the hill to our house in 2-gallon buckets. The creek water was used to bath in and to wash clothes. This water was alos used to wash dishes. Mom always boiled the water before she done dishes and she had two metal dish pans that she washed them in. We got our drinking water from a spring further down in the holler. It was an ingenious set-up, someone had dug the spring out a little and had inserted a length of 1-inch pipe in it, so the cold, mountain spring water ran all the time. That water was always so cold that it’d hurt your teeth, and it tasted like water should. I don’t think I’ve ever had water so pure since those days. To aide in obtaining water for warshday, we had a big barrel under every drip to catch water from when it rained. It was a lot easier getting rainwater out of the barrel than hauling it all the way from the creek. But that’s another story for another day, so back to talking about “warsh day”.

Manys the time I’ve seen my mother wash clothes using the old wash board or “warshboard” as we called it. She’d scrub them and bang her hands on the old washboard so many times that her fingers and knuckles would bleed. She even referred to her washboard as “the old knucklebuster”. Mom would use a big galvanized tub to wash in, and it would sit on our back porch. This was the same tub that we’d bathe in.



Using a washboard. Photo courtesy of Ryan Greenberg.

While Mom knew how to make soap, she rarely did. Perhaps it was a sign of the times or maybe just good marketing, but Mom always insisted on using Tide soap powders and Downy softener. She said that babies liked Downy, and we were babies. Mom still is a Tide & Downy person.

I am also reminded that Mom used the old type mangles to wring out clothes, but they were really more of a nuisance than a help, so she’d usually solicit the help of one of the older kids to help her wring the clothes out by hand. Mom still jokes on occasion about why they were called mangles, she said if you didn’t know how to properly use them, they would mangle you up. After wringing them out, she’d sop them down and around in the tub of rinse water, and then wring them out again. Then they were ready to hang on the clothesline.

While using the warshboard was considered behind the times even when I was a kid, Moms expertise with it sure paid off during the aftermath of the Great Flood of 1985 when she once again was seen using the old warshboard and tub method of laundry.

When we moved up on the mountain, we had a well but it wasn’t deep enough to run an automatic washer but at least it kept us from having to haul water. Then Mom got a little apartment sized automatic washing machine with a spinner on it. It worked good enough, but we could still only do around 1 load of laundry a day, and you really had to space out showers and such, to the tune of about 3 hours apart.

So you can see why it was a really big deal when Mom and Dad got a wringer washing machine. It was a 1932 model, it was used of course, this was the late 1980’s, but it worked like a dream. We kept in the backyard, and covered it with a tarp when it wasn’t in use. We used it for so long that the wheels rusted off of the legs and then the legs started slowing rusting off. So, we done what was required to keep our buddy in working order, we put it up on blocks. It worked for years like that. Of course, since it was up on blocks, it got a name and everyone settled on “Fairlane”. After all it was a sign of affluence to have a Fairlane up on blocks in the backyard.

Fairlane done a great job of washing clothes although the wringer was heck on zippers in blue jeans. It would bust them out, bend them, break them, as often as it wouldn’t. I took to complaining about it so usually we’d wring the jeans up to the zipper, then back them out of the wringer, and wring the rest by hand. Then hang them on the line. It may have been more work, but it sure saved zippers!

One thing that stands out in my mind is the almost thrill of when laundry was done and the washer was drained. You had to remove the daddler to rinse under it, and after this was done, you usually found the lost coins from all of the pants pockets that had passed through the washer. In my family, whoever rinsed out the tub of the wringer washer, got to keep this change. It usually averaged around a dollar, certainly nothing to snivel at, especially for a kid.

In the summer months, even Fairlane required more water than our little well could supply, so we hand-dug a little well in a wet place against the hill. This was only a few feet from where we kept Fairlane. We dug it down about 8 feet deep but a gigantic rock prevented us from digging it deeper. Regardless, the little hand dug well was always full of water, and it really helped provide water for both Fairlane and the vegetable gardens, especially in the dry months.




The old hand-dug well.

Mom even to this day likes to hang her laundry on the clothesline. And Mom is one of those people who can’t abide having any dirty laundry in the house so she’d do laundry every day, leading to our clothesline bearing the appearance of being in a perpetual state of drying. This was summer or winter. I recall many mornings where I’d have to go out before getting ready for school to get a pair of jeans off of the clothesline. They’d be frozen stiff, so I’d bring them in, and lay them over the wood stove, turning them frequently. They’d thaw out and be only slightly damp, you know, to the point where they’d dry after a few minutes of putting them on. When I got into my teen years, I made sure I’d get a pair of jeans off the clothesline in the evening and hang them somewhere in the living room overnight so I’d have completely dry jeans for school. I’d usually always have a clean, dry pair to wear but just in case I forgot to put my clothes in the laundry basket, that’s what I done. Like I said, Mom washed nearly every day so it was sometimes hard to keep up with her.



Ahhh, Mother's clothesline.

As the old saying goes, “All good things must come to an end”, and that was the case with Fairlane. For all of the years that we had him, he never so much as needed anything more than a daddler, but one day after years of service, his motor gave out. Since his wringer was also beginning to pop apart when wringing out clothes, we decided it best to just let him go to that big laundromat in the sky. After Fairlane’s demise, we had other wringer washing machines to come and live with us, but none of them lasted as long nor had as much character as Fairlane.

In closing, a few years ago Mom and Dad had a big well drilled and it produces around 5 gallons a minute, which is more than enough to run a full-sized automatic washing machine. Since then, Mom and Dad have never been without an automatic washer, but Mom frequently asks Dad if they can get another wringer washing machine. She says she prefers them to automatic washers! Go figure. And she still insists on hanging her clothes out on the clothesline!

Grasshoppers and Pine Resin

One of my favorite things to do when I was in college was to pass on our family stories to my little cousins. Since I grew up with their parents they were more like nieces and nephews to me, so I felt it my obligation to spoil them.

I used to tell them (and still do) stories about how life used to be. Over the years, we have them convinced that my mother is an old woman nearing 100 years of age, when in fact she is but in her early 50’s. When we are all around her, my brother and I tell them that she ain’t been the same since that time she fell off of the train bridge. I can see in their eyes that they are picturing her falling off a train bridge back in the early 1900’s!! They just look at my mom with pity in their eyes, and say “Poor ole thing” and try to do things for her since she is so old. As a matter of fact, years ago my brother and I even gave our mother a new name to go along with her newly created elderly personality…Maude. All of the children just love Maude because she is like a kind old grandmother to them all, and they truly believe she holds the wisdom of the ages. The thing the kids don’t realize about Maude is that if she doesn’t know it, she will make it up!

Dad and "Maude".

I remember a few years ago, my little cousins were out “exploring” the Burns property. While it may have been a new experience for them, this was the very same land that my brother and I had explored a generation before, and our Dad before us, and his daddy before him, probably on back to when my family first settled here in the 1700’s. Well, during their great exploration, the kids came upon an old “fort” that my brother and I had built about decade earlier; we had made it out of tree limbs and carried rocks in for a floor and everything. By our standards, we had it lookin’ good. We even had an old cast iron stove up there that was a cast off from our house. The kids thought they had come upon El Dorado or something, because when they ran home to tell about it, their eyes were wide with excitement and they were rattling away like a bell clapper to a goose’s ass. After they described the place, I told them, “Yeah, I know where that is. Maude, did you hear that, they found my old house.” Their eyes immediately lit up and asked me how was it my house. I went on the tell them that when I was about 15 years old, I wanted some privacy so I built me a little lean-to up on the mountain and stayed there for about 2 years. Since they were kids, they didn’t put together that two years on the mountain in a lean-to would have been torture, or that I would have still been a teenager.

They were putty in my hands, so I elaborated on my story. I told them that the old stove up there was what I used for heat and to cook on. I remembered there were some empty cans up there from where my brother and I used to pack our lunch for our all day excursions, so I told them that the cans were from the food I ate. One of them questioningly asked me, “But there weren’t enough cans for you to have ate up there all winter”. I retorted, “No, there sure wasn’t was there, if you go up to the old pine tree, you will see that it is oozing sap in several places, that’s where I tapped it for pine resin. When I ran out of food, I lived on grasshoppers and pine resin!” I further explained to them that grasshoppers and pine resin really sticks to your ribs, and that grasshoppers are easy to dry and store all winter long. Well, they were eating this story all up, and insisted I go up to the old fort with them, so they could ask me questions about it. I went with them, and they tried their best to trip me up in a lie, but one by one I could see each of them start to believe me. I showed them the old pine tree with the resin running down the sides of it. Each one of them had to sample the pine resin, and they all said it tasted terrible and asked me how I could eat such stuff. I told them, “You’d be surprised what you’ll eat when you get hungry, and besides, you develop a taste for it.” I couldn’t, however, manage to get them to sample a grasshopper!

My little cousins Mernie and Bub.

I had an answer for everything they could think to ask. For example, there was an old stone box that my brother had built out of flat rocks, and when they found it they asked me what that was for, I said that I had kept live rattlesnakes in it so I’d have fresh meat in the winter months, and that once it got cold, the snakes were real sluggish so you didn’t have to worry about them crawling away. To further add to my fabricated tale, I exclaimed astonishment when I looked over at some nearby huckleberry bushes that were growing, “Wow, look at those bushes, they really have grown since I lived here.” I told them I transplanted those pushes from further up on the mountain so I’d have huckleberries to pick.

My little cousins Mernie and Clyde.

Then, one of the kids found some wild turkey feathers in the leaves that were windblown up against the walls of the stick fort. They didn’t realize that’s where me and Jason had cleaned off the leaf litter, and that wild turkeys would come in there to eat the acorns that had fallen on the bare ground. They undoubtedly would have left some feathers here and there. But, you can see where I’m going with this, I told them that those must be the feathers from that turkey that I had killed with my throwing stick! They asked me what a throwing stick was, and I said it is a smooth stick that could be thrown with so much force that it could kill a bird or even rabbits and such. Of course, they wanted me to show them and they went and found me a smooth stick. I made a big show of it, telling them they had to hold the stick at just the right angle and throw it with just enough force…and they would have to take into account the direction the wind was blowing that day. With great showmanship, I then drew back my arm and threw the throwing stick, and it went flying awkwardly through the air until it cumbersomely hit a large rock. Just as it hit the rock, a rabbit dodged out from behind it. I exclaimed, “Well, I almost got us a rabbit for supper, that darn rock got in the way.” They really thought I was something then, they hadn’t even seen that rabbit sitting there, and since I apparently had, that was all the proof they needed to believe in my extensive wilderness survival skills!

When we got home, my cousin Brittany asked Maude why she had let me live up there for so long when I had a home right here that had real food in it, and to this Maude replied, “Well, it was a different time then and boys had to learn how to survive in those days!”

And people wonder why the kids are so spoiled!!