Chug A Chug A

 Chug A Chug A is what I hear, not just on Monday Washday but on any day at any time. Living in a condo means being with and knowing all about the other people. You live with their noise. I have probably the best sorts of folks above me and I almost never hear them now that the little pony grand kids have grown beyond the trot across the floor hours at a time phase.  I complained only once early on, and regretted it from then on. What I learned to do to tolerate the little hoofs on high, was to play jazz which is not only comforting but drowns out the clippety clop upstairs. I live in a very old, wonderful building that has hardwood flooring with hot water heating pipes in them. Cement buildings were not yet invented. For some reason, the pipes don't play along with the thump thump. Too bad, because that might be a great riff.  My current noise situation has nothing to do with little grandchildren but only in perhaps an abstract way. Their laundry. It is the washing machine that the upper woman uses, that is my present topic. I am sure that it is the same one that my mother had in the fifties. Mom couldn't stand the noise either, therefore, she had my father take it down to the basement and there she instructed me how to use it. My mother made sure that I knew how to do housework among other essential tasks so that she could depart to tea with her friends. She told us that every girl needed to know about these matters because one day she would move out with her Hope Chest full of pretty china and linens, and get married. At five years old we made beds and set tables. Properly. Being a teen in those days, meant that you did what your mother told you to do eschewing running around at game schedules, lessons, school and play dates. No one had TV and phones were only one to a house. Money was scarce. Twenty-five cents allowance got you a Saturday movie and a sack of popcorn. No other parental money was forthcoming. You had to work at a paper route or babysit if you needed more. School supplies were free then. You got maybe a new pair of shoes and clothes once year and labels didn't count. You felt very lucky to have all these luxuries. For fun, you joined the  library and played street baseball and tennis if you could afford a racket. That was average, not poor. Few were rich where I lived.  Back to the washing machine. Our washing machine was like most others with a wringer attached to the top. These were things that instilled horror in young minds. We heard tales of women getting their hair ripped off when it was caught in the wringer. Move aside S. King. After the clothes were beaten to death by the metal chugging churner and the soapy water was drained via an old hose that led out to the garden, you filled the machine up with cold water to rinse everything. When it drained, you plucked out the sopping wet items and fed them into the wringer that ran constantly. The items went in one side and were squashed to a flat mass of wrinkles on the way out. After all, we had irons in those days because perma press wasn't alive. When I hear the chug a chug a upstairs now, I want to run up and see if it isn't my mother's old one. If it were, I'd give it a hug, but only if  my hair was in a pony tail and the wringer wasn't on.