by Dot Smith

The day dawned bright and only slightly overcast with big fluffy clouds floating high in the sky. A warm breeze gently ruffled the blinding white bed sheets strung along the clothesline. Stretching four deep slightly behind and perpendicular to the house, the clotheslines could easily be seen from the street. By stringing the bed linens on the front line, the family's more personal laundry could be shielded from public view; this was standard practice, part of the strict routine followed in doing the family's weekly laundry. Without fail, Ada devoted one day of every week following her well-established laundry-day routine.

By the early 1960's, the family was most fortunate to have been able to finally afford an automated wringer type washing machine. No longer did Ada have to use the washboard, which now occupied a prominent space on the kitchen wall above the new washing machine. The washboard was still used periodically for really tough stains where a little elbow grease was needed. As a part of her routine, Ada always sorted the clothes into piles by color and washed the whites first. The whites, which included the bedding, were washed and hung first on the front line, always.

On this particular sunny afternoon, Ada had almost completed the laundry, but it was getting late and she had a couple of errands to run. She seldom went downtown, but she had put off making the trip long enough that she now had several things that needed to be addressed. The family had no car so she had to rely on public transportation; the bus was fairly reliable, but traveling by bus usually meant the trip downtown and back would take at least four hours. She needed to leave soon in order to get home in time to cook dinner.

Ada decided the girls, Dot and Erma, were old and competent enough to finish the wash and straighten up the kitchen without her. "Girls," Ada said, "I have to run downtown to take care of some business and pick up something. Can you finish the wash and put the kitchen in order for me?"

"Sure momma!" The girls chorused. With this assurance from the pair, Ada hurriedly dressed and left. After all, there was only one load of clothes to rinse and hang and a final load to be washed. Surely, the girls were old enough to do that; they had been helping her for ages and knew exactly what had to be done. After all, Erma, the older of the two, was twelve and Dot, while younger by eighteen months, knew exactly what to do and had been a welcome helpmate for a number of years.

For the girls, the best thing about washing was feeding the clothes through the wringer; it could get messy if one was not careful, but it was fun to watch the clothes go from dripping wet to just damp as they moved through the wringer. Since this was the best part of the job, both girls naturally wanted to be the one to do it.

"Dot," said Erma, "I'm the oldest and I'm in charge. I'll wring the clothes and you hang them on the line."

Dot, who had helped her mother wash on a regular basis, did not think this division of labor was fair. "Why do I have to do all the hard work?" she complained loudly. "Why can't we both wring and hang? You do one load and I do one load, Okay?" she reasoned.

"Okay," Erma reluctantly agreed. "But, I'll do the first load," Erma said. The clothes had finished rinsing, so she turned off the agitator, turned on the wringer, and picked up the first piece of clothing to push through the wringer. The long sleeved work shirt was fairly large; it belonged to their father. Since Erma rarely helped with the laundry, she did not realize that the larger items had to be fed through the wringer carefully to avoid getting stuck. In her zeal, Erma slapped the shirt against the bottom roller of the wringer and pushed the shirt through. About mid way through the wringer, the shirt stuck; there was simply too much material trying to squeeze through the narrow space.

"It's stuck!" she screamed. The rollers were grinding; there was the smell of smoke and Erma panicked. She tried to pull the shirt back out, but it refused to bulge.

"Turn the wringer off," Dot yelled, and immediately followed her own instructions. She then released the lever on the wringer and gently pulled the shirt from between the rollers; it was no big deal. During the first few times she had helped her mother, clothes had gotten stuck and her mother had come to the rescue in the same fashion.

Dot proceeded to show Erma how the shirt should be held and fed through the wringer to prevent it from getting stuck. Following this incident, the wash was completed without further incident. In fact, the girls were sharing the responsibility of hanging the last of the wash on the clothesline when noticed that Erma had a stain on her shorts. She inquired, "Erma, what did you sit in?"

Erma turned and stretched her neck trying to see the seat of her shorts without much success. "I don't know," she said. "What does it look like? ' she asked.

"Well," Dot thought for a moment looking at the growing stain. "It looks like blood."

"Blood!" Erma screeched. She threw the piece of laundry she had been holding in her hands back into the laundry basket and ran into the house. Dot followed more slowly, but no less excitedly. She was worried about her sister.

By the time Dot reached the bathroom, Erma was emerging with a frown on her face. "I'm bleeding Dot," she declared in a little girl's voice.

"Where?" Dot asked. "Let me see," she began helping Erma remove her shorts. Knocking Dot's hands out of the way, Erma cried, "No! I'm not sure where the blood is coming from. I think it's coming from my kitty-cat," she cried in earnest as large tears rolled unchecked down her smooth brown cheeks. "I'm dying, she declared. "What are we going to do?" she asked thinking how angry her mother was going to be when she found out that she had ruined several pairs of her best shorts and panties.

"Are you still bleeding," Dot asked wondering how her sister could be bleeding when they had not been fighting and she had not been in an accident. Erma, looking a little puzzled, turned and went back into the bathroom to check. She came back out a few moments later looking sadder than ever.

"I'm still bleeding, there's blood everywhere. I've changed panties three times and I need to change them again," she declared sadly.

Erma emerged from the bathroom a few moments later with her soiled laundry. Handing the soliled laundry to Dot she said, "What am I going to do now, Dot?"

Dot looked at her older sister and thought for a minute, but nothing in her youthful experience provided an answer to her sister's dilemma. She had never heard of anyone bleeding without an accompanying physical injury of some kind. Her sister was apparently dying from some mysterious illness unknown to them. A profound wave of sadness engulfed her; Erma was too young to , neither of them had ever even been kissed. Overcome with grief, grabbed her sister and hugged her tightly. The girls started crying inconsolably.

Once the tears dried up, the girls approached the problem facing them practically. As Erma soiled underwear, Dot tossed them into the washing machine and hung them out to dry. For the next hour, the routine kept the girls too busy to worry about Erma's imminent demise; staying one step ahead of their dwindling supply of panties was more important.

Because they were rapidly running out of space on the clothesline, Dot decided to take in the now dry bedding and use the space on the front line to hang the panties. The space was quickly filled with multi-colored panties fluttering in the warm afternoon breeze, a definite breach of laundry etiquette and established wash day routine. The girls were too concerned about Erma's mysterious illness and staying ahead of their dwindling supply of clean dry panties to be concerned with the view from the street. However, for Ada returning from her trip downtown, the sight was enough to give her a heart attack. All those panties in clear view for anyone walking or driving down the street to see was simply too much to bear.

Ada stormed into the house demanding, "Why in the world did ya'll wash every pair of drawers ya'll own and hang them on the front line for the whole world to see?"

The girls, who had been far too busy to notice their mother's return, startled at the sound of her voice. They were so happy to see her that they immediately burst into tears of relief. "What in the world is wrong with ya'll?" Ada yelled over the noisy sniffling of the obviously distraught girls.

In unison, the girls tried to explain about Erma's dying. Raising her hands, Ada said, "Wait a minute, one at a time please." Looking at the older of the two girls, Ada asked, " Erma what happened?"

"Well, momma," Erma started reluctantly now that there was no competition to get a word in edgewise. "We did the wash like you said, and was almost through with it when I had an accident in my panties," she finished lamely.

"Accident?" Ada questioned. "What kind of accident?" she asked.

"Momma she started bleeding in her kitty out of the blue and wouldn't stop," Dot explained. "We used up all our panties, but the blood still kept coming," Dot explained. "Momma, is Erma dying?" the little girl wanted to know.

"No," Ada said. "Your sister is not dying." Ada looked at her little girls with a somewhat defeated expression on her somber face. She knew her child was not dying, but the task before her was not one she relished. She had put it off as long as she could. She had to admit that her little girls had grown up, and it was time to explain some of the harsh facts of life to at least one of them.

"Dot, honey you finish up this load of clothes and empty the machine. We won't be needing it anymore today." With that said, she ushered Erma into the bathroom. Dot assumed her mother would conduct a thorough investigation and resolve whatever the problem was as she always did. Following her mother's instructions, Dot completed the final load of clothes and hung them on the line. She had just finished pushing the washing machine snugly into its corner of the kitchen when Erma and her mother emerged from the bathroom.

If the expression on Erma's face was any indication, obviously, Erma was not going to die. In fact, Dot thought she looked rather smug, and was burning with curiosity to know what it was that momma had told her. Neither Ada nor Erma made an effort to enlighten Dot. Ada began the daily preparations for dinner and Erma made her way slowly to the back door apparently headed for the shade tree and the grouping of wooden seats beneath it.

Dot looked from her mother to her departing sister, and decided that the better source of information was her sister. Following Erma to the tree, Dot asked, "Well, what did momma say? What is wrong with you?" She desperately wanted to know.

Erma looked up from intently studying her tattered sneakers. "Nothing is wrong with me," she declared with more confidence that she had displayed all day. Dot waited for her to explain, but she did not say anything more.

"Well?" she asked again exasperated.

Erma said nothing more about the incident refusing to share the big secret with her younger sister. Dot remained in the dark until returning to school in the fall. It was in the library that she learned the facts about women and their menstrual cycle. By the time she started her own cycle, nearly two years later, the resourceful Dot had amassed the necessary information to prevent a recurrence of the day of the big secret. There was no need for her mother to take her to the bathroom, and whisper about the very natural process of maturing into womanhood. She already knew she was not dying. After all, there was no big secret about the cycle of life.