Mondays

Before they invented big-screen televisions and botulism was something you never wanted to find in your food, never mind inject into your wrinkles, Mondays were washdays.

In the damp concrete-floored, low-ceilinged cave that was our basement, my mother had an Easy brand wringer washing machine with an agitator the size of an outboard boat motor. The machine’s electrical cord was the size of my ten-year-old wrist and when you plugged it in, the whole contraption made the most wonderfully frightening grinding roar as it mashed up the dirty clothes into a sudsy pudding.

As the eldest, I got to feed the corners of the bed sheets into the finger-mangling rollers of the wringer, every shove forward an audacious flirt with danger. Would it be painful if my hand got dragged in? I can vouch for the relentless undertow of the spinning rubber cylinders, but they actually didn’t hurt that much.

Once the soiled water had been squished from the load, they were dropped into a huge tub filled either with a dilute blend of Reckitt’s fabric blue or bunch of herbs like lavender (remember, this was way before bottled fabric softener). It was time to empty the tub and refill it with clean water. Since we had no indoor plumbing, that meant a couple of trips to the pump in the corner of the cellar to fill up the galvanized tin pail. We were eco-friendly before it because the in-thing to do – we always washed in cold water! I’m not sure of the formulation of the Sunlight soap bars we used to scrub stains, but they were strong enough to strip off the epidermis if you left your hands un-rinsed for long.

The scent of sun-dried laundry was glorious. Winters, though, were a chore. Baskets of damp clothing had to be manhandled to the back porch and hung quickly on the plastic-coated line before fingers grew stiff with cold. At the end of the day, everything was frozen into cardboard cutouts of their thawed shapes, sharp enough to wound the unwary. Of course they couldn’t be folded. Instead, we took turns wrestling them into the house. Sometimes, depending on how cool and dry it was inside, they’d hang for days on lines of cord criss-crossed under the basement ceiling.

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Why Mystery?

by Hyacinthe Miller • 14 July 2026

Ordinary people = engaging suspense

Gooooooaaaaaallll!

by Hyacinthe Miller • 2 July 2026

When people think about international sporting events, they often picture the action inside stadiums jammed with tens of thousands of screaming fans. Yet, some of the most memorable moments happen far beyond the first and last whistles. What I’ve seen in Mexico during a FIFA match, is entire towns transformed by watch parties in homes or bars, convoys of vehicles honking horns and waving flags from windows, and everyone out celebrating. We’re all wearing green shirts in honour of our Mexican football team and it’s amazing. It’s been a time when strangers become neighbours for a few unforgettable weeks. Walking through the streets at any time of day, you can feel the energy. Hawkers are selling Mexican themed team shirts of all kinds. Families bring their lawn chairs to the malacon to watch the match on a big screen television set up by the skateboard park. Before and afterwards, folks gather in the central square. A few weeks ago, I was on a flight from Toronto to Mexico City connecting to Guadalajara. Fans from all over the world were wearing team jerseys. There was such a happy buzz of pride and laughter. The man I sat beside was born in Mexico but hadn’t been back in forty-one years (he’d had a complicated life). He had tickets to games in Mexico City (CDMX) and Guadalajara. When we arrived in Guadalajara airport, there were two lines of people dressed in team colours greeting everyone heading out of the terminal. Music, chanting, dancing—I’d never seen anything like it. Last night on my way home from watching the game with a group of friends, there were no cars on the streets. It was eerily quiet. Even the dogs were silent. Yet, form every house I passed by on the way home, I could hear the game and cheers behind the curtains. When Mexico ended the game with a 2-0 win, then the celebrations spilled into the streets. Lots of cohetes being set off, cheering, and horns honking long after the match had ended. Everywhere you look, people are wearing team jerseys, interesting headgear or draping themselves in the flag. The sense of excitement is contagious. What makes the celebration especially memorable is the friendliness of the Mexican people. We saw lots of that hospitality offered in Tijuana to the Iranian team, whose exclusion form the US meant they had to fly out of Mexico for every match, and return afterwards. The Korean team will remember Mexican hospitality for a long time. In fact, there are lots of memes circulating that in nine months, there will be dozens of Korean Mexican babies born with names like Fernando Kim, Yoon Sun Lopez, Andreas Lorenzo Lee, Lourdes Maria Park. Especially in these troubled times, events like soccer with teams from around the world, remind us that competition can unite people and give them a break from political shanigans.

Mondays

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