The Girl Who Loved Mountains by Layla Lawlor

Author:Layla Lawlor
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

There was no time for fretting on Shaking Out Day. I soon learned why it was called that, as all the women in the village hauled out their bedsheets, rugs, linens, and even the mattress covers, dumping the old, smelly straw on top of the garden. The men betook themselves out to the fields to stay out from underfoot, Su among them; I was too busy to catch up to him and find out where he'd been that morning. Boys too small to escape were drafted to work along with the women and girls.

And work we did, sweeping the house from top to bottom, beating the rugs, dashing buckets of water on the low wooden porch. I made a few cursory attempts to record my observations, but was always getting called away to help with something or other. Finally I put my notebook on a high shelf among the dishes where it was reasonably safe from being splashed with water in my skirt pocket or accidentally dropped in the creek as I rushed from place to place with the others.

The weather could not have been finer. The sky was cloudless and mild, the sunshine warm on my shoulders as I helped the little girls beat rugs. Still, I did not relish the idea of washing the entire household's supply of sheets in the ice-cold mountain stream, which it seemed we were going to have to do. With our arms laden, we picked our way down the usual path to the water-dipping and clothes-washing place—I averted my eyes from the gleaming new idol as the other women did—but this time, Meham turned and trotted on a path along the stream. I had to hurry to catch up with her.

"We show you a trick now," she said over her shoulder to me.

Hauling our great burdens of soiled sheets, Liss and I followed her to the waterfall below the mill. Here, a small crowd of cheerful, singing women and girls had woven a great cage from willow-withes, like an enormous fish trap, across the creek where it spilled out from the waterfall pool. Taking turns with the others, we threw our sheets under the falls and let the water beat them. Tossed and turned by the churning water, scoured by sand, they eventually fetched up against the cage. We hauled them out and, if they were not clean enough, threw them back in for another go. At the end, we rinsed them in the creek to get rid of residual mud and then wrung them out on the shoreline before traipsing back and draping them to dry in the yard.

"Good trick, no?" Meham said to me.

"Very good trick, yes," I agreed. Come to think of it, I had only ever helped her with small items of household laundry, never anything large. My village would have been lucky to have such a waterfall nearby.

When the mattress covers had aired in the sunshine and we'd beaten the ticks and lice out of them, we brought

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