Clotheslines

Clothesline in March

On brisk, chilly March mornings when you could drink the air, one of the most glorious sights to behold is a clothesline in full use. I have loved clotheslines since I was a girl and my mother taught me how to hang the big white sheets (doubled, of course) and my father’s workshirts (upside down) and the pillowcases (open so the wind could billow through). We hung our little white cotton smalls in the middle lines, as unobtrusively as possible.

It was a splendid clothesline at 80 West Main Street with at least six or seven lines stretched far between two solid metal T’s. Way out in the back yard, it was flanked by the neighbor’s barn on one side and a gnarled apple tree and flowering quince on the other.

With her infinite practicality, my mother used to put the top sheet on the bottom of each bed and wash the bottom sheet and the pillowcases every week, rain or shine. Even in winter when the sheets froze on the line like great pieces of white cardboard, the clothesline was in use. It’s such a part of my memory, one of those things I rarely think about, unless I am clothesline-less.

When I finally got a clothesline here on Cape Cod after a hiatus of several years, I wondered how I had ever managed without the crisp fragrance of sun and wind caught in sheets, the scratchy towels, the crinkly lace curtains, the jeans that can stand up by themselves. It’s wonderful to thumb my nose at the dryer and its rapacious hunger for electricity. Wonderful to know that all’s right with the world when I look out the back window and see the sheets snapping in the March wind.

I am with clothesline again.