Stahlke Adoption

A Loose End

I wrote a blog entry from Ukraine on 9/21/08 titled Reality? Or a Dream? While intending to follow it up with another entry, events moved on, and I never answered the question.

The only laundromat in Ukraine that I visited was the one in my dream (or more accurately, nightmare!). The source of anxiety that prompted the dream was the washing machine in our Kirovohrad flat. While I enjoy traveling, one of the challenges is figuring out myriad new ways of doing things, especially, it seems, with plumbing. Which way does the faucet turn? Which spigot has hot water? How do you turn on the shower? Where is the handle to flush the toilet? How many handles are there to flush the toilet? (We saw toilets in Ukraine with two different flushing handles--one for a lot of water and another for just a little. Creative idea.)

Jonathan and I have previous experience with clothes-washing equipment from the communist era. In 1994, during our time in eastern Germany, we lived for a few months in one of the ubiquitous concrete apartment blocks there. Our two-room flat had a spinner to remove the water from the clothes after we hand-washed them. The first time we attempted to use it, the machine marched all over the bathroom and made a deafening racket. We eventually learned to pad it with several towels to dampen the noise, and Jonathan sat on the thing to hold it still. The spinner was so energetic that I wasn't strong enough to control it. The trouble was worth the effort, however, since the clothes dried a whole lot faster and our arms didn't get so sore from wringing out clothes.

In 2008, Jonathan and I found ourselves in another concrete apartment block, with another clothes-washing appliance in the bathroom. The instructions were brief, but it didn't matter since they were in Russian, anyway. This washing machine was a large cylindrical canister, about three feet high and 18 inches in diameter. It sported a lid on top, a slanted floor inside at the bottom, and a rubber drain tube at the lowest point. Underneath the canister was a small motor to run the agitator.

I was tired of washing clothes by hand, and it was difficult to get them clean enough. (One challenge was the weather--it had been so wet that the clothes had soured before drying and now they were even harder to wash.) So Jonathan and I agreed one night that we would tackle the washing machine the next day. That night I had my nightmare.

The next day, we spent about two hours washing our clothes. I used the detachable shower head to fill the canister with water, and the timer on the motor got the agitator moving. The drain tube worked as a siphon, and we managed to empty the water into the bathtub most of the time. (It did create a mess when it slipped and emptied out on the floor once or twice.) But I was happy that our clothes were now quite clean. The one thing the machine didn't do, however, was dry the clothes. While line-drying worked for most things, the damp weather meant that we had to iron our socks, sweaters, and other thick clothes.

Once we figured out how to work this appliance, my dream did not recur--thank goodness.

posted by Stahlkes @ 12:20 PM