Alina pulled up the sleeves of her dress as she dropped one of her father’s shirts into the wash barrel. She picked up the bar of lye soap and began scrubbing the material, covering it in the cleaner. As she began running the shirt up and down the wash board, she started humming one of her favorite lullabies that her mother had sung to her when she was a child. She stopped humming to scrub four times roughly, and then the humming resumed as she swished the shirt around in the water. She repeated this several times before she finally took the shirt out to the pump to rinse. The wisps of her hair had fallen out of the braid she had woven it into that morning, and she brushed them away with her wrist smearing water across her forehead.
It was a beautiful day. Alina smiled as she looked up to
