“You’re
doing the washing on your birthday?” I was appalled. My mother
was going to spend her birthday doing the family laundry. Such a
thing was unthinkable to my five-year-old mind.
Vowing
to my young self that I would never ever in all my life do
the laundry on my birthday, I felt keenly disappointed in my
mother for not planning her life better. A birthday is huge
when you’re five, and I couldn’t imagine anything
important enough to interfere with the day.
For
my mother, the washing was an all-day labor — filling the
Dexter washing machine’s double tubs with water, stirring up a
pan of starch on one burner of the stove, warming a pan of bluing (to
make the white clothing whiter) on another, feeding each item of
clothing through the wringer from the wash tub to the rinse tubs,
then passing everything back through the wringer to the clothes
basket, and finally hanging the wash on the line to dry — and
to me, it was the most unbirthday-like thing anyone could possibly
do.
It
was years before I realized that maybe my mother wanted to
do the laundry that day, even though it was her birthday. Maybe
Mother wanted to have clean clothing for her family even more than
she wanted personal pleasures.
Lots
of birthdays have come and gone for me, and it has become clear that
life is not really about how much fun we can have on our birthdays.
It’s
not even about whether we were the generation who used the double-tub
Dexter, or the previous one who hauled water from the spring, heated
it over an open fire, and made their own soap; or the current one who
just sets a dial and presses the “on” button.
Life
is about doing our duty, whatever it may be. It’s about serving
those we love.
A native of Salt Lake City, Daryl Hoole has written and lectured extensively on home
management and family living. She has served on the ward, stake, regional, and general levels of
the Church. It has also been her privilege to fulfill three missions -- once to the Netherlands
when she was young and single; another time as companion to her husband as he presided over
the Netherlands Amsterdam Mission; and the third time with two other senior couples as Asia
Area Welfare/Humanitarian Administrators, headquartered in Hong Kong.
She and her husband Hank and are the parents of eight living children, the grandparents of thirty-six, and the great-grandparents of a rapidly increasing number.