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Thursday, October 4, 2012
A Dog, A Washing Machine, and a Bag of Flour
All I wanted was a dog, a washing machine, and a bag of flour when I first lived on my own that was how I created a sense of home.
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for me, a table, a chair, and a cast-iron skillet. I slept on the floor and washed my clothes at a wretched laundromat across from Tompkins Square. Or, when I was too broke for that, in my bathtub, which luckily was in the kitchen. A dog was unimaginable at that time. Happily, things would change. But I never got a washing machine.
Thank you John,
I think I have you quoted about this story from one of your books---on this blog...My younger half brother also had a bathtub in the kitchen when he lived in NY.
Bill washed his clothes in the tub when I first met him. He lived on the third floor of a triple decker on top of a hill on Barnes Street in Providence. His street was cobblestone. He was at the time, teaching science at School One, the hippy high school. He had made a drying rack out of rope shaped into a grid that he strung above the tub. At the end of the school day he sat in his hammock on the front porch swaying with a magnificent view over the whole city. It gave me vertigo.
I got my washer for 25 dollars from a very old lady who gave me the instruction manual with it which I am sure I still have somewhere. The machine lasted 15 more years including when we were squatters in the Woonsocket machine shop mill. I wasn't even in college when I first got it -- but a washer was on my list after the dog. Prior to that I wore navy wool sailor pants for years(!!) before finally washing them in the kitchen sink.
Travis, my Zen-like blonde-lab-shepherd mix was at the Animal Rescue League on Elbow Street in Providence, in the last cage. He never barked. He just looked at me as if he was expecting me. We were inseparable as Lily and I are now. I still take my pets to Dr. Peter Belinsky--who has been my vet for 33 years.
The day I got my kitchen Aid mixer I put a seat belt on it when driving it home.. . .I do have a love of domestic machines.
Emily
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