Pârlăul și maiul bunei Maria de la Maciova Vorbe și meșteșuguri demult uitate

The idea for this report started from a simple curiosity: I did a Google search to find a synonym or what the word "pârlău" means. I also heard it for the first time in Maciova when I met Aunt Maria – or good Maria as her relatives call her. In the village of Maciova in Caras Severin, good Maria lives, a 70-year-old woman. The woman is the last weaver who still works on the loom in the Caransebeș area. After finishing her work on the household, because she also has a greenhouse that she personally takes care of, plus a strawberry and raspberry plantation, good Maria, helped by her two grandchildren, gets on the loom and weaves. She weaves the material for the folk costumes that she also makes by hand. She also has a house full of ponevi and poclavițe woven by her own hand, or collected from the village over time. Some are over 100 years old. Bună Maria is and a keeper of folk traditions and old objects, objects with which she opened a small museum. She bought an old house over 200 years old that she wants to transform into a museum. For now, she has collected old objects there - some over 100 years old - with which she has created a small exhibition. Her greatest wish is to renovate the old house to set up in a real village museum of the Maciova area and for someone to learn the craft of weaving from her. From good Maria I learned how the women of the village used to wash. There is a specially arranged place by the river. There is a small pit paved with river stones where the water gathers and is deeper. That is where the rinsing place is. At the edge of the pit, on the bank, from boulders and stone slabs, the place where the women beat the laundry and woven cloths with the wooden loom is arranged. But Before reaching this operation, the laundry and sheets or strumacuri woven from hemp or flax were subjected to the soaking process, pre-washing as we call it today. This operation was done with lye in a special device called a pârlău. It was made from a willow or linden trunk hollowed out in the middle and plugged at one end with wheat straw. It was basically a wooden tube. In the pârlău, in the evening, the fabrics were placed and hot lye strained with ash was placed on top of them. Then the lye was allowed to act and pass through all the clothes and come out through the opposite side through the straw plug. Then the laundry was put in the covată and taken to the river where they were beaten with a mallet, rinsed, then given with household soap, beaten with a mallet again and when the water came out clean, the laundry was rinsed in the vat – the pit next to the slab. Then the laundry was put to be wrung out and dried on the wormwood bushes or on the willows on the riverbank. Nowadays, out of at least 15 Banat residents asked “what is a vat” – only 4 were able to give us an answer. Times and weather change, people change too, they modernize and unfortunately, they forget the most precious thing: the language of the people. Luckily, here and there, a good Maria from Maciova still appears, or a professor Rancu in Valea Almajului or a “Paore from Banat” who does not want a piece of his village or a fragment of the ancestral language to disappear with him.