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.