When it was
dry enough to handle all the women in the neighbourhood were called
together. They sat outside the bath house and picked the flax to pieces.
Then they beat it with swingles, to separate the fine white fibres from
the dry stems. As they worked, the women grew gray with dust; their hair
and clothing were covered with flax seed, but they did not seem to mind
it. All day the swingles pounded, and the chatter went on, so that when
one went near the old bath house it sounded as if a blustering storm had
broken loose there.
After the work with the flax, came the big hard-tack baking, the sheep
shearing, and the servants' moving time. In November there were busy
slaughter days, with salting of meats, sausage making, baking of blood
pudding, and candle steeping. The seamstress who used to make up their
homespun dresses had to come at this time, of course, and those were
always two pleasant weeks--when the women folk sat together and busied
themselves with sewing. The cobbler, who made shoes for the entire
household, sat working at the same time in the men-servants' quarters,
and one never tired of watching him as he cut the leather and soled and
heeled the shoes and put eyelets in the shoestring holes.
But the greatest rush came around Christmas time. Lucia Day--when the
housemaid went about dressed in white, with candles in her hair, and
served coffee to everybody at five in the morning--came as a sort of
reminder that for the next two weeks they could not count on much sleep.
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