“There, in front of us, where a broken row of
houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts
of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a
clothesline . . .it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of
roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behing the clothesline
as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that
the finder cannot un-see once it has been seen. A brilliant, and moving, mixture
of perception and reality”.
-
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
My
place is a place of clotheslines. Which is exceptional, nowadays. When I was a
child, I played amongst the ballooning sheets and pillow cases, imagining
myself an explorer in caves of snow and ice; or as a princess in a swirl of
ball-gown taffeta. When my own children were small they did the same thing. Spirited games of tag sometimes resulted in
collapsed lines, the clothes in sodden heaps like languished mannequins.
When I
lived, for a while, in the international housing complex of an American
university, the joy of the clothesline was the joy of colour; of movement; of
elegance. In a splayed, green pasture row upon row of clotheslines creaked in
the wind, bedecked with billows of yards of colourful sari or turban cloths.
African-patterned dresses, pants, and tunics capered alongside. Children screeched
and laughed as they dove into the damp drapes of fabric, and babies lay on rugs
under the clothesline, the sun-dotted sway of sheets sending them off to sleep.
The
first community we lived in on arrival back in Canada did not allow
clotheslines. Clotheslines were out-lawed by by-laws. The smell of over-dried
clothes puffed from dryer vents, but not a single sock nor bra besmirched the
piousness of barren back yards. I recall
that as a child in England poverty-ridden tenements boasted lines of laundry
that draped across the street from kitchen window to kitchen window. I imagine
that it is that sort of image, in part, that creates the property value
lowering connotation of clotheslines. ‘Airing your laundry’ is considered in
bad taste. In that regard, I suppose that draping my t-shirts to dry over
blueberry bushes or draping old dungarees over the back of wicker garden chairs
could be perceived as a form of anarchism, or just low wages.
But my
place does not have such silly by-laws. A breezy summer’s day is an invitation
to allow one’s raimnants to flirt with the wind.
I have heard of something called Project Laundry, which includes a
collection of clothesline art and poems and essays that praise the joys of
using a clothesline. Apparently, there are even clothesline
consciousness-raising parties, and there is actually a National Hanging Out Day
in the United States on April 19th and a lobby to have weather-persons
give drying forecasts each day.
I would love to see, again, pastures of colour
and peek-a-boo children in the sheets; the ache of textile to free itself from
clothes pegs and pins and dance a mad, dervish tarantella with the wind.
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