Obsolescence and Wringer Washing Machines

Crossposted from Blogetary 2.0

One of the exercises from "Clear Out the Static in Your Attic" is to take something that's obsolete and explore it from the perspective of being out of time. Look at the tension that happens when it is out of its regular time and place. Alternately, try to imagine something that is used all the time now, which may become obsolete sometime in the future. Explore what that looks like.

For this exercise I decided to explore the old wringer washing machine that's used at Pickett Fences down the street.

This GE Wringer Washer is similar to the one my gramma had.

 

 Time in a Washing Machine

The shop was one of those upper class boutiques that fakes old-fashioned working class sensibilities with creaky wood floors and fixed-up crap your grandparents and great-grandparents threw out because the new stuff from Sears & Roebuck really did work better. Vintage things you could have gotten from your parents for free when they cleaned out the attic or the garage or went through your grandparents things after a funeral, sat next to artisanal objects and products handcrafted — sometimes by special snowflakes and sometimes by actual artists and artisans.

And all of the items — Vintage and artisanal alike — cost much more than your working class family would have ever dreamed of paying for such things as soaps, scarves, cards, buttons, and other cool objects.

Old things made new and cool again.

New things being cool because they had the patina of being old, because they could.

One of the shiny new old things in the store was the outer shell of a wringer washer sitting in the middle of the store.

I wasn't going to go into the store, I really wasn't. My budget didn't normally include visiting boutiques that had objects that cost enough to bite into my grocery budget, or clothes that would only fit prepubescent girls with no hips.

But this old wringer washer, sitting in the middle of the room, it drew me in.

I felt myself shrinking as I approached the old washer. Slowly, I was changing from a 50-something woman in a 21st century city, to a small-town six or seven-year-old girl. Gramma's voice was in my head warning me stay away from the wringer washer as she fed in the clothes from the basin into the hard rubber spools. My little hands and arms might get caught up and pulled through the wringer.

My six-year-old self wanted to help her grandmother, but obediently clasped her hands behind her back as she stood on tiptoe to see into the basin. Watch the clothes pulled out, fed into the wringer, back into the basin. Rinse. Repeat. Hung to dry on the clothesline in the utility room of the basement.

And then I am standing over the hollowed out basin in the boutique, once again a grown woman, and staring into a container of vintage scarves. This is nothing but a display piece. No monster agitator to mangle my hands and my clothes. No greedy wringers to take off my fingers or arms. Inert. Dead. The working-class demon is now an empty shell of itself in an upper class boutique on Larchmont Boulevard.