Tales on a Clothesline

There were sheets billowing about on my clothesline the other day, and I heard my son’s girlfriend Emily say, “I wish we had a clothesline.” I looked at my sturdy steel T’s holding the line, and I let a little wave of gratitude roll through me. My mom has always said that of all her chores over the years, she has most tolerated hanging out clothes. She has gone so far to say she enjoys it. I don’t know if it’s because she liked it or because it’s genetic or if I just like it all by myself, but I enjoy it, too.

One of the first things I think about clotheslines is a family story that gets told when we gather, and although we know it, we still love to hear it. My sister Kathryn and I both carried around “security blankets,” as Charles Schultz dubbed them, when we were tots. When I was either not born yet or not more than a bland, squishy wad of an infant in a bassinet, my sister had the blanket thing going on strong. She carried the yellow, silk-edged blanky around everywhere, hugging it, cuddling with it, and sucking her finger while touching the satin edges. This sort of practice obviously invites in families of germs, so there comes a time in every blanket’s life that it must surrender to the washing machine. Mom would have to coax the blanky out of Kathryn’s little hands. The tot anguished while the blanket swirled around in the washer. Then Mom hung it out on the line. Kathryn missed it so much that she dragged her little rocking chair out to the clothesline and settled under the damp blanket, sucking her finger and rocking. It must have been quite the scene, this pretty blonde child lounging in her rocker, holding fast to her blanket. The girl knew how to relax.

A bit later, our line was the go-to throughout the summer months, especially since my dad built a swimming pool for us, which he opened with some ceremony in 1966 when I was 3. The pool has a “hopper” deep end, meaning that all four sides go down to a flat, three-foot-square floor. There is a safety step all around the deep end, and the shallow end is three feet deep. I vividly recall the day Dad started filling the pool with the garden hose. All seven of us were down in the hopper as the water inched upward. We all had on our swim suits, and I remember patting around in the absolutely freezing water when it was just a few inches deep. Mom was wearing her bathing cap. Such a celebration! After that, it seems that we went swimming every day. All summer long, I bolted out the back door and went to the clothesline, jumped up to grab the edge of my bathing suit and yank it off the line, and thus knocking a bunch of other things off simultaneously. On many mornings, it was straight from pajamas to the bathing suit — now that is some summertime living. Our pool towels decorated the line all the time, making a colorful design. I remember one of my towels had a sailboat on it. I would grab a corner and drag it off the line, too, making the wire bounce back up wildly, which, as noted, would often swing anything else right off. I was a whirlwind.

Everyone in the neighborhood had clotheslines when I was little. Clyde and Mary Lyle Gnegy were our neighbors, and their line was close to our yard. Mary Lyle would hang out her sheets, and they would billow and snap in the breeze. Another neighbor had the “umbrella” line, which was circular and did look like an inside-out umbrella. I liked that one because it reminded me of the one in a Little Golden Book titled “We Help Mommy” by Jean Cushman and illustrated by Eloise Wilkin (one of my all-time favorite illustrators). I loved that book. Published in 1959, it was a staple of my childhood, and I sought it out for my boys, too. It’s a sweet and simple book that shows how the little girl and little boy help their mommy and daddy with chores. The girl, Martha, has a doll, and she and her mommy wash the doll’s clothes, and then Martha hangs them on her own miniature umbrella clothesline! I wanted that clothesline! And those little doll clothes! And heck, how about the doll, too! Martha and her mommy made pies, and Martha made her own miniature one with a cherry on the top. I loved baking with my mom, too, so it was very familiar.

Mom did laundry every Monday. Every single Monday. She would wash our sheets and hang them out. I have never washed our sheets that regularly, I fully admit. But Mom did. We didn’t even own a dryer until after I was born, and she didn’t use it much. On Monday night, often after a bath, I would slide into those crisp sheets and breathe in the fragrance that only comes from clothesline drying. So fresh and clean. Mom would say, “Don’t they smell good?” And I would answer by taking in another long inhale. I’m grateful for knowing that smell, and for the sensation of comfort it brings me. I’m also grateful for having a mother who took a moment to bring my attention to it. She always says she is no artist, and that my siblings and I didn’t get any artistic talent from her. But I believe she has the sensibilities of an artist through and through. Artists notice things like the scent of line-dried sheets. They notice such beauty and long to share it with other people. I think my mom is an artist at heart.

When I moved to my first apartment on my own, I really missed having a clothesline. There was a laundry room, of course, with a line of washers and dryers. I did learn that handy thing of starting a few loads at once in a few machines, and then using one or two dryers at the same time, too, thus finishing up my laundry in about 90 minutes — unlike when you own the equipment and have to do everything one load at a time. But that was the only real plus to having the laundry room at the Ridgewood Apartments in Carrboro, N.C., the site of my first place. There was no way to air-dry anything really, and that was frustrating. When John and I moved into a little house together soon after, I was so excited to have a yard, and not in small part because I could set up a clothesline. Back to air-dryed sheets! Woot! But it took a few lessons in physics for me to understand that a successful clothesline requires more than just being tied to two trees in order to suspend 50 pounds of wet sheets and jeans. Yeah, I learned that lesson pretty quick as I watched the thing sag with each item I hung, and then struggled to lift it all off the ground as it gave in to gravity. I soon learned that I could tie one end to the tree and drag the other end in through a window, where I anchored it with our piano. A rather hilarious set-up, really, but it worked. Well, it worked after the first time when it gave out and I was stuck inside holding the one end with no one home at the time to help me. Quite a Lucille-Ball-type conundrum, as I recall. I did figure it out at last, though, and we had fresh sheets again. Anything to get that fragrance back.

John and I bought our house in Oakland in 1991. Attached to the back outside wall were two circular, metal disks that held clotheslines. The lines were retractable, and could be pulled out and attached to something solid in order to create the line. For me it was reminiscent of all those many scenes in films when dresses, nightgowns, socks, and underdrawers are hanging across narrow city streets of crowded, noisy neighborhoods. I figure those lines were retractable, too. And people had to work together to have successful lines, right? I mean, how else could the lines traverse the street unless two apartment dwellers got together and made plans to do it? How did that work? “Hey, let’s have lunch and discuss our clothesline strategy.” Like that? Maybe. But I digress. The disks were not hugely successful or convenient. After a while, we took them down. Around that time, Mom told me the clothesline at Clyde and Mary Lyle’s house was coming down, and it was offered to us. Clyde had died and Mary Lyle wasn’t hanging out laundry anymore. I must say I was touched to receive such an odd gift. These laundry posts are not messing around, let me tell you. They are heavy steel, and we poured concrete for the base. They are solid as rocks. I can hang quilts, blankets, jeans, and any other damp thing on those lines and they stay up like champions. If we ever leave this house, I’m going to want to dig them up.

I have hung out a lot of laundry on that line over the years. John has, too. There are certainly a variety of techniques in hanging stuff, that’s for sure, and I don’t know if anyone agrees on them. I could swear a million times that I hang sheets like my mom showed me, but anytime she has ever witnessed me doing it, she says, “Why are you doing them like that?” I got to the place of betting that she would say that next time she saw me doing it, and I always won that bet. I don’t ever do them the way she thinks she taught me. I don’t know which one of us is right. As for John, he hangs things with such precision, as he does everything. He can hang a sheet in a way that lets him fold it off the line with such even and square corners that he could probably cut a chunk of butter with the edge. It’s the same as pie crust. I showed him my recipe for crust, and he did it on his own. I had been doing crusts for much longer, but my edging is always sloppy. It doesn’t matter how much I try to have a neat and crisp edge, it always looks like I did it while wearing boxing gloves. Not John’s. His pie crust edge looks like it was done in a factory. I don’t understand it…. But again, I digress.

In the days when our three monkeys were all under three feet tall, I would hang out several pieces of clothing, thus saving on electricity as well as infusing their wardrobes with outside air smells. But nowadays I generally just hang out sheets and blankets, and sometimes shirts on hangers. The time is past of having six or eight pairs of little jeans strung along the line sharing clothespins, or 12 T-shirts taking up one entire row. When I did have all those little boy clothes to wash and hang out, I shared my mom’s tolerance for that chore. I liked shaking out the wet undershirts and shorts, getting whiffs of the detergent. I loved how quickly it would all dry on a hot day. And I felt I was cutting the job down by folding stuff right as I took it from the line. I could be outside, too, in the sunshine and warmth. When our youngest began struggling with allergies, I was dismayed when his specialist said I should not hang out his things, filling them with the pollen of the gazillion plants to which he was apparently sensitive. I did stop hanging out all his stuff, but couldn’t help hanging out a blanket or two occasionally. I hope he did not suffer from that. I like to think I helped him with immunity. Yeah, that’s it.

Every cat I have ever had seemed to like the whole clothesline process. Sahib, Zoe, and Molly — all long gone — and now Miles, Rex, and Pig…. all of them seem pleased to spend time with me at the clothesline. They like the basket, and rub their faces against it. They sit nearby, squinting in the sun and looking satisfied. Rex tends to express himself with his long, buff-colored tail. When he is particularly jazzed to be alive and to be sharing space with someone he loves, his tail switches about, left to right, in the shape of a question mark. He whips it back and forth so fast, while rubbing his face on the clothes basket and then against my legs. He flops down on the grass and rolls onto his back, his four paws pointing North, South, East, and West. He gazes up at me, legs lolled out, and appears to be chock-full of contentment in this shared moment we two are having in the sun, amidst the fragrance of the outdoors. This adventure of living this minute is all right, Rex says, especially since I am with you.

The chore can be a meditative one, too. It’s usually quiet, and takes a while if there are many pieces to hang. Mom has told me about a time she was hanging out laundry soon after her mother’s death. My grandmother did not live to be old. Having rheumatic fever as a child left her heart damaged. Nowadays she could have a valve replacement and live on. But it was the 1950s and there was no such technology. So she became sickly and was frail and weak until finally dying at age 66. Mom was only 27. I think that is young to lose one’s mother. Mom said she was hanging laundry and was beset with missing her mom so much, and she yearned to know exactly where she had gone. “Where are you?” Mom said she asked the air. “Where did you go?” Her anguish was real and pointed. One can have all the faith in the world, but when faced with actual loss, the actual end of a life, a relationship — the disappearing of a person so loved, so important, now silenced utterly — the questions loom large and desperate. I think Mom was experiencing “saudade,” pronounced sow’-da-chay. Taken from a Brazilian dialect, it is described as “the love that remains” after someone is gone. Saudade signifies the emptiness experienced by a person when a loved one who should be there is missing, but also the happiness once felt when the person was alive. Both sad and happy feelings mix together: sadness for the missing, and happiness for having experienced the past. As my mom stood at the clothesline doing her chore taught to her by her mother, her mind was screaming out in angst to the vast and mysterious void — “Mom, where are you?” Saudade.

My three sons are men now, all in their 20s. My job of hanging out their clothes has come to a close. But I did find my way to the clothesline a few weeks ago, knowing that they were all going to be home soon. I washed sheets and blankets and hung them out, once more infusing them with the scent of home, of comfort, of peace (and probably of pollen — sorry, Michael). I don’t know if they notice, but I like to think it’s all part of the whole package John and I still wish to give them when they come back to us on occasion. I want them to be wrapped in the familiar, and to be assured yet again of how much they have always been loved.

What are your clothesline stories? Tell me in the comment section. What do you recollect? Good or bad, write your memories. I want to read them. Go!