In our last episode, I wondered how they get the whites so white. (The eternal washday mystery?)  The secret is finally revealed. 

  I stopped by Theresa’s home on the way back from the airport Saturday and caught her doing the laundry.  Before, I had asked her point blank “How do you get the clothes so white?”  With a grin she said “I just put them in the Hoover with some bleach.”  (Wouldn’t Clorox love that answer?)  Well, that’s only part of the answer. 

  There is a local soap powder and a local bleach, vile strong stuff, guaranteed to give you “washday hands”  The clothes go in the Hoover with plenty of that. As the clothes agitate, Teresa takes each piece out and _hand scrubs_ it. If it has a bad stain she dips it into the soap powder and scrubs it, dipping it occasionally into straight bleach. If it is still stained it goes into the batía, a little shallow bath tub where it can soak for a while longer.   Then she scrubs the stain with a scrub brush, rinses it, and if it’s still stained, she does it again.  Finally she rinses everything in a five gallon bucket and hangs it up in the sun to dry. This whole process spills so much water on the floor that she has to do it outside.

  Rick’s socks have been coming back bone white, but the foot part of the sock is stretched out to a size twelve!!  He thought maybe it was from hanging them by the toes, so he politely asked Theresa if maybe she could hang them from the top?  After watching the whitening process I have come to the conclusion that it’s the scrubbing and not the hanging. 

 And that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is how they get the clothes so white. I am  washing the towels and darks in our American automatic washer, but I think I’ll just keep sending the whites to Theresa.

  Too bad you don’t have a Theresa to send your whites to.

Charlotte

Copyright, CASELab, 1999.  All rights reserved.