Kettle River news

The next Kettle River City Council meeting is 7 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 14 at the Kettle River Senior Center. I encourage all residents to attend these meetings.

The next Ma & Pa Kettle Days meeting starts at 1 p.m., Jan. 29 at the Kettle River Senior Center. It is important that anyone who wants to see this organization continue come to this meeting. We will have an election of officers at this meeting. We need three officers to maintain our status. At this time, we will have one vacancy that will need to be filled.

Quilting at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church is 9 a.m. to noon every Wednesday.

When I was young, I would spend some time every summer with my grandmother. Laundry day was a real project. First, I would have to take the wagon with a 5-gallon can and walk to town to get the kerosene. That was about six blocks away.

After bringing it home, we then put it into the kerosene heater, then pumped the water from the well and carried it to fill the tub to heat. The next morning, we would transfer the hot water into the washing machine and rinse tubs, and start the laundry.

White clothes always were in the first load, and the bleach and bluing was in the first rinse tub. Then each load was a little darker until the darkest clothes were last. After that, we would hang the clothes on the line to dry, and empty all the water into the garden.

Once the clothes were ready to iron, grandma had flat irons heating on the cook stove, which was heated with corn cobs, and we would iron until the iron got too cold and then transfer to another hot flat iron.

One summer, my cousin and I tried to see how many clothes we could get on the line before the elderly neighbor would come to help us. She always thought she was helping us, but it always took much longer when she did.