Every single woman in the town visited the
rocks at least once a weak. It was the perfect place to do laundry by the
river, but also a place for encounter. They would discuss the latest news, as
well as sharing some of their most personal things. Not every woman went there
at the same time, so small groups of them visited the rocks every few hours. It
was never crowded because they all knew at what time they should be visiting in
order to find the people they communicated best with.
The ones that arrived at the earliest were
mostly older. For some reason, experienced women tended to do their chores as
early as they could. It was kind of an irony because they were the ones with
the least amount of work at home and there in the rocks. After washing a couple
of undergarments from their husbands, they were finished and did not know what
else to do. They usually stayed on until the last woman had finished. That
means they only stayed about an hour in the morning.
The biggest group visited the rocks after midday.
It was the time when most women had finished cooking for their families, so
they all decided to process their meal by doing some exercise, and washing
laundry was exactly that. Some women spent up to three hours there. It wasn’t
very surprising considering the amount of dirty clothes accumulated by one
husband and at least three young children. It was a lot of clothes to clean and
they did it as fast as they could, as they talked and laughed.
Then, there was a small group of women that
visited the rocks an hour before sunlight disappeared. They normally visited
that late because they really didn’t want to confront other woman during the
day. They just wanted to do their thing and then leave as soon as possible.
Women that visited at that time were often widows or single, having never
married. They were just a handful in town but enough to make people talk about
them. That’s why they preferred a certain darkness.
What they all had in common, and rarely
realized, was that every single one of them loved to visit the rocks because it
gave them an outlet, it was something different from seeing men every single
day and then having to do what they said. There, in the rocks, no man was in
charge. Actually, they practically never went there, as they knew they would
encounter a large number of women and men always felt a bit scared when
outnumbered by anyone. The rocks were only for women and, as such, it was a
safe space where they could discuss anything.
It wasn’t uncommon to hear women curse and
talk about their families in a not so kind way. A person hearing them out of
context would never understand how much these women actually cared for their
families. But they would sometimes need to vent their dissatisfaction with some
of the thing that happened at home, because they needed to tell someone. In the
household, the men were not supposed to be bothered with those issues and
children were too immature to understand.
So they only had each other to talk about
those things that only women went through. Of course, they didn’t all got along
as adults are complicated and there’s always some kind of animosity against
someone because they did something you may think is wrong. That’s why the
single women had their own scheduled to clean. Because they didn’t wanted
married woman to ridicule them in their own time, when they needed to feel they
could breath for at least a second.
The point was that life for women was very
difficult in town and they were grateful to have a space of their own to talk
and have a little bit of fun once a week. There was no fun in anything else
they did and their little town, so out of the way of the world, was sometimes
too slow and boring for any of them to feel they were living the best life
possible. Granted, some of them stated often they could never have a big city
life as the change would be too much and they thought of urbanites as sinners.
Religion, as expected, had always been a very
important part of the town’s life. Every single person, or at least most of the
people, would go every Sunday to the mass. There, Father McGregor would tell
them once and again that their ways were wrong and that it was time to correct
them in order to get into the kingdom of heaven. Sometimes he softened his
words but it wasn’t something that happened often. It was clear that religion
wanted people to be scared and they were effective at that.
So much so, that women sometimes felt guilty
of whom they were just because they were women. They discussed it sometimes on
the rocks, but it was a very complicated subject that some of them didn’t want
to talk about because they felt heir beliefs were above anything else. These
women had been raised to believe that they were inferior, by nature, to men and
most had assimilated that and thought it was true. Changing that was very
complicated so that’s why it wasn’t a very popular subject to bring to the
table. Something more entertaining was always better.
On the rocks, they laugh, they cried and they
shared thoughts and words and what little knowledge came their way. Sometimes
they could stop talking and other times, there was a silence that settled in
and made them fell protected somehow. It was strange but after so many time
there, they knew exactly how they should behave there and how they should do it
at home and how it was better to never mix both worlds, because doing that
could be dangerous to anyone.
A woman once remembered a funny anecdote she
had heard on the rocks and laughed out loud. That happened in her home but in
front of her husband and children, while they were having supper. She tried to
explain what she had remembered but the only thing that happened was that the
husband stood up in silence, walked towards her and then slapped her as hard as
he possibly could. The pain on her cheek was enough to understand that she
could never mix the rocks with her daily life.
Every women had a story like that, sometimes
more tragic, sometimes less surprising. But they had all experienced what it
felt to be something like a domesticated animal working for a master. They were
like the bulls that helped in the fields or the horses that carried people from
one place to the other. There were not that many differences between the two
and that made them angry and hopeless. So they discussed it sometimes and they
always ended up with a sour taste in their mouths.
However, the rocks existed. And as long as the
women had them to go and have a chat, they would feel empowered to keep going,
to keep living day after day even if it felt difficult and, sometimes,
impossible.
