Heaven in a Clothesline

“See, now, I wanna clothesline!”

I’m sitting in the noodle-shaped back yard that backs my tiny, old, ramshackle house. It’s Territory Days weekend, and cars are parked along every available spot on my street, hood-by-bumper thick. Families and couples walk by in expectation of instant fun on what is, in effect, a very crowded outdoor mall. Men wear Jack Daniels t-shirts; women sport plastic cowboy hats. Two hours or so later they come back, dragging crying, exhausted children in strollers and wagons. Sarah Palin can see Russia from her yard; I can hear the sound system from the music booth on 28th and Colorado, as far west as the street fair goes.

Jake and I went yesterday. I had twelve bucks tucked in a buttoned pocket, which turned out to be enough for a plate of chocolate-sauce covered funnel cake, since neither of us had the patience to wait in the block-long line for turkey legs. As the syrup dripped all over my shoes, we dutifully walked, as quickly as we could, past all the booths facing south, then turned back to observe the second half. We stopped for a few minutes to listen to the surprisingly great-voiced singer in Bancroft Park. I thought about how Tim would critique the Subarus parked in their usual spot by the ice cream shop.

We stopped to relieve the parched soil of the community garden on the way home, but the effort seemed as futile symbolically as our fight with the watering can, against the hot-drying wind. Seriously, what difference will a community garden make, in a world so desperate for materialistic entertainment that they’ll turn out in the tens of thousands to walk past booths of people selling the junkiest toys and the trashiest food?

Having performed our West Side resident duty for the year, we went back to our usual summer lives. This morning I sliced some homemade bread for Jake’s breakfast, performed the Yoga routine I’ve cobbled together, ran 5 or so miles of trail in the Garden of the Gods, connected to Jake via cell phone line. I came home, lectured him a little on living sans-electronics for at least some of his life, ran a load of laundry and hung it on, yes, the clothesline behind my house.

There’s a definite beauty in the act of hanging laundry. You take a piece out of the basket, give it the shake you’ve perfected in years of practice, quickly judge how best to hang it to minimize wrinkles and drying time. Then you do the next piece, until they’re all done. A few hours later, you take it down, warm from the sun, with not a single static spark on the most artificial-fibered items. Even t-shirts and shorts give you a sense of accomplishment, but the sheets, which retain a straight-from-heaven scent even a few days later as you spread them on your bed, are the ultimate reward.

I’ll be the first to admit the task takes too much time during the uncertain weather and busy schedule of my winter. But every year it’s one way I celebrate summer’s coming. I remember my sturdy grandmother, who hung taut sheets on a taut line on the cement back porch behind her sweet house in Brno, the Czech Republic. And most of all, I think of my mother, whose commitment to drying on a clothesline led to an unfriendly visit from the leaders of her neighborhood association in Texas, and who now dodges the rains of Seattle to dry her laundry.

There are, of course, sound carbon-fighting reasons for drying clothes this way. Dryers take up a disproportionate amount of electricity, increase the temperature in an already summer-heated house, and cause house fires, too. I’ve read about college dorms adding indoor drying spaces, and again remembered my grandma, who had an entire room in the basement devoted to nothing but. Going completely without electric dryer systems seems a little extreme to me - but very much an American, either-or kind of solution. Me, I like having the option, in case, you know, it rains, or snows, or hails, any of which are, in Colorado Springs in June, a possibility.

In the meantime, though, even though the young woman spoke her admiration for my clothesline in a sort of “oh, check out the fun natives” style, I saw it as a sign of hope. She probably arrived in an air-conditioned SUV with about four times the needed interior space. But she wanted a clothesline.

Adventures in Vacation Parenting

You’d think if anyone could deal with a vacationing eleven year old, it would be me.
We middle school special ed teachers, after all, pretty much get it all. This year I had a kid whose nervous system slowly, inexorably deteriorated all year long; by March, I watched urine dripping down from her wheelchair, her eyes full of tears, in the middle of language class. Another student rarely bathed, got the glasses he needed only after the community facilitator supervised his exam and drove to the optician to pick them up, and had twenty absences in the spring semester – and his lugubrious learning curve showed it. Other kids were only cooperative as long as there was candy in the offing; the rest of the time, behaviors such as reading, writing, or completing math assignments seemed beyond their repertoire.
But those kids go home at the end of the day. We teachers sigh, mentally shake ourselves like a lab getting out of a pond of water, finish whatever paperwork must be turned in before the end of the day, and go home, to think about our students only sporadically. Your own kid doesn’t leave, especially during vacations; he’s there at noon, at 3, and at 730 at night too.
Parenting is exceptionally interesting when you’re the vacation parent. I spend a little over 4 weeks of the summer with Jake. Some of the days are easy, when we run up to the Denver museum, or the zoo, or when his friend comes over and they spend the day play-fighting mostly, upstairs in his room or in the yard. But the rest of the time, Jake voices only one ambition – to watch videos of Anime cartoons on the computer.
I understand his need for predictable, easy-to-decipher stories. As a kid, I loved the novels of Karl Mai for the same reason. I’ve no idea how many times I reread the tales of Old Shatterhand and his Apache friend Vinetou, acted them out with my friends when I could, daydreamed how I too would reduce foes to fearful jelly. But this summer I’ve decided to limit the time Jake spends with his Anime friends, in an effort to reduce his dependence on passive electronic entertainment.
My decision wasn’t well received.
“So I was thinking,” he said as we walked to the community garden to water our so-far-dormant seeds, “what if I read for an hour, and then I can get two hours on the computer?”
“You can get an hour if you spend an hour reading, and pick up a trashcan of sticks from the yard,” I responded.
“A trashcan? No way! Not gonna do it!”
“Ok, well, then you aren’t getting on the computer.”
If you’ve dealt with an eleven-year-old who thinks he’s getting a raw deal, you pretty well know what came next. Jake told me that I used to do fun things with him, but “now all we do is go to the community garden.” He told me that his dad was much more fun, because he took Jake fishing. That I was just as bad as his stepmother. He demanded to call his father (who is probably incommunicado on a fishing trip, but that was beside the point.) He demanded to go to his father’s house. When we got home and I still hadn’t relented, he picked up a book.
Ten minutes later he came out to where I was hanging the laundry on the line. “I’m sorry…”
And so it went for the next hour or so. He was angry, and said so, kicked shoes and books on the floor, yelled at the cats. Then he said he was sorry. Then he tried to negotiate the time back up to two hours. We compromised on an hour and half. He demanded I take him to his father’s house. He picked up the shovel, though I think not even he knew what he planned to do with it.
We’re still at it. He’s finished his reading; now he’ll need to do stick patrol; then he can get on the computer.
I, in the meantime, excoriate myself for not having set more limits on his computer use all along. When you’ve only got your kid a little of the time, it’s hard to remember that raising them is your job too.