Why Pete Pearson again? Because I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned him before, but as my mother would say, sometimes it’s necessary to chew my cabbage twice.

As I set off marching through the house to get today’s inside steps, I had only a single thought in mind: It’s Tuesday. What the hell is the blog going to be about?”

Somewhere around lap number two, I remembered how, whenever there was an uncomfortable pause in any given conversation, my mother, Evie, would say, “Well, we could always talk about Pete Pearson’s eyebrows.”

Please bear in mind that, to my knowledge, I never actually met Pete Pearson in person, so I have no idea what he actually looked like. I’ve always assumed that he was someone my folks knew back in South Dakota, and I imagined that his memorable eyebrows probably were on the bushy side, sort of like Groucho Marx’s. It occurred to me that my two older sisters might have met the man, but Janice, the elder one, passed away during Covid but not of Covid, so I can’t ask her. As for sister number two? She doesn’t remember meeting the man in question. Given all that, today you’ll have to settle for another Evie Busk story.

Born in 1914, she was a remarkable woman–energetic, funny, cheerful, resourceful, and lucky, too. Growing up, I remember that if there were prizes to be won at baby showers or Tupperware parties, you can bet that Evie came home with at least one of them. At a Grant County Fair in South Dakota in the mid-forties, she won an EasySpin washing machine. It had two compartments, one for washing and one for spinning. Living on a working farm with a husband and three kids, I’m sure having a washing machine would have been a big help. The problem is, the farm where they lived had no electricity. (Hand washing clothing for a family of five and trying to dry it indoors in wintertime South Dakota is more than I can imagine!) But, although they owned that EasySpin washing machine and couldn’t use it, they didn’t unload it, either.

Then along came 1948. That was a tough one. My father spent six months of that year bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis, leaving my mother to manage the farm—including milking seventeen cows—and the household. When a doctor advised my dad to move to a high, dry climate, they sold off almost everything they owned and, in 1949, moved—lock, stock, barrel, and washing machine along with 300 quarts of Evie’s previous year’s canning—to Bisbee, Arizona, where their new old house, the one on Yuma Trail which had been built in the twenties, did have electricity.

Twice a week my mother would roll the washing machine into the kitchen along with her trusty wash tub. She’d start by washing the whites with hot water. Then she’d drain that water into the tub. Then while the first load was spinning, she’d reload the water into the washing compartment and do the next load made up of the colored clothing. When that load went into the spinner, she repeated the process, using already twice-used water, to wash work clothes and jeans. Once the clothes were washed, she used a rolling clothes basket out to the clothesline to hang the wet clothes up outside. Eventually she got a Maytag automatic washer, one that lasted for decades, but she never bothered with a dryer. According to her, clothes that came out of a dryer didn’t smell the same way sun-dried ones did.

For the next thirty years Evie was outside hanging wet clothes on clothes lines twice a week. Did she wear a hat? Nope. Did she wear sunscreen? Nope. Sunscreen wasn’t a thing back then. As a consequence, with her fair complexion, it’s hardly surprising that, by the time the seventies rolled around, she little spots of skin cancers began showing up on her face—especially on her nose. The doctor who removed the cancers advised her to wear a hat because she needed something to protect her nose.

And now you’re going to discover why I’m telling you all this today. Did she go straight out and buy herself a sun bonnet? Nope, she did not. Instead, she went to Franklin’s Five and Dime and bought a rubber Groucho Marx mask. The beak nose on that covered hers perfectly and the rubber glasses and eyebrows didn’t interfere with her glasses in the least. From then on, that’s what she wore every time she went outside to hang clothes.

When my younger brother, Jim, returned from Viet Nam, he showed up in Bisbee unannounced with a buddy along for the ride. They arrived at the house and went around back where my mother happened to be standing with her back turned, hanging clothes on the clothesline.

Wanting to introduce her to his friend, my brother began, “And this is my…mother?”

And there she was in all her laundry day glory, Groucho Marx mask and all.

I don’t think my brother’s buddy ever quite recovered from that introduction, but there you have it. That was Evie Busk in a nutshell.