Second Rinse
Sunday is my laundry day here in Guyana. With the tropical heat, I go through a mound of clothes in a week. There’s no wearing a shirt and hanging it back in the closet after a mild day. There are no mild days. Temps hover between the low 90s during the day and the mid 70s at night, all year round. It’s a boon for my vegetable garden and gives me fresh tomatoes 12 months a year, but it’s hell on my laundry schedule. Despite the fact that I need to get an early start on Sundays to get the chores done, Mother Earth has a way of saying, “Slow down. Get some rest. Hit that snooze button more than once.”
She does this with rain. Big, fat, wake you up with the noise splatting on the metal roof, puddle-creating, ground-soaking rain.
Our home here is in the village (what we would call a faubourg in New Orleans and a neighborhood everywhere else in the States) of Goedverwagting, in the region of East Coast Demerara, just east of the capitol, Georgetown. The Atlantic Ocean is about a four-iron from our front gate and the massive Guyanese bush borders all of the developed areas along the coast. If everyone here were to rapture into the heavens tomorrow, it would only take a few fortnights for the rainforest to fight back, march across all the road and buildings and meet up with the sea, where it longs to be. Being sandwiched between the rainforest and the ocean, we get a delightful, morning rain shower more days than not.
After a day of equatorial sun, the ocean, and the forest cool at different rates and with different results. In the canopy of the forest, the cooling is quicker than over the water and the moisture condenses rapidly and the humidity spikes overnight. When that brutal sun reemerges the next morning, it heats the moisture laden forest air and sends all that water soaring skyward and northward into the lower pressure over the ocean. There it meets the ocean air. Just as it takes the ocean air longer to cool in the evening, it also takes longer to warm in the morning. When the hot moist air from the forest meets this cool air over the ocean, it abruptly halts its rise, surrenders it ascent and falls back to earth, seemingly all at once. It’s glorious, but not if you tried to get an early start on laundry the day before and left the washing on the line.
Electricity is expensive here in Guyana. Expensive enough that you notice what it costs to run things. The split unit air conditioners all have timers so you can set them up to turn off before you leave the house and turn back on before you return home so that you can save the expense, but also not have to walk back into a hot house. You do the same for unoccupied bedrooms, closing them off and killing the a/c until you have a guest. I do the same
before I go to bed each night, setting all the timers to wake the air-con thirty minutes or so before my alarm and leaving only the unit in my bedroom running overnight. I may be growing accustomed to much of my new surroundings, but there are a few “American things” that I cling to…namely air conditioning and my big-ass fridge. Back home I never ponder the cost of running the dryer, but here, anything that whirs, buzzes, illuminates or cools has a known price. Instead of shelling out five bucks to run a load, I use the ever-present sun and coastal breeze. It takes just a few minutes to string up a load, and the results are fantastic. The whites are whiter and everything takes on fragrance of the lush surroundings.
When I first came here I tried to get ahead of my weekend laundry schedule by doing half of it Saturday afternoon. The washing is easy and I do use a machine for that. I’m all about saving some money on electricity, but beating soapy clothes on a rock is where I draw the line. I figured there is plenty of afternoon sun to get everything dry and for the most part, there is. But Saturdays being Saturdays, later afternoons would often turn into early evenings and the siren calls of rum and goat curry were often too much to ignore. I figured there would be no harm in leaving the laundry on the line overnight. I could always just get up a little early on Sunday and jump back into the role of laundress. But the Arawak Zemi, Boinayel the Rain Giver, simply said “nope.”
This is what I call the Guyana Second Rinse. All the sheets, t-shirts, socks, boxer-briefs, dress shirts, pants, shorts, towels and pillowcases (now soaked in morning rain) cause the lines to sag with sad, wet, heavy reminders of my folly. Tempting Boinayel has consequences.
If the past seventeen months have taught me anything, its to pay attention to my surroundings and not drift through my world, unbothered to see. I need to see the obvious costs. See the patterns of nature. See the rhythm of life and my tiny part in it. Thank you Boinayel. I’ll have my cold Banks and hot curry on Saturday. There is plenty of time on Sunday for laundry.