Laundry

I adore the fresh scent of sheets that have dried outdoors. I love to hang out clothes. Windy days when the sheets flap back into my face. Hot days when the first load is almost dried by the time I get the second load out. Rainy afternoons where I have to run to get my clothes in before getting soaked.

My love affair with the clothesline began as a child. Slipping into cool sheets on a hot summers night and the smell, oh the smell. Even now when I make my bed with fresh linens it sends me back. In a family of eight you better believe clothes were hung out. I learned from my mother how to separate and hang everything from underwear to towels. All the socks first, then the underwear, the shirts, and finally the pants. That order has not changed for me in forty years.

About four years ago we moved to a cottage with a little over one acre in a small town. Here I decided that I must hang out my clothes. The search for clothesline posts was on. No success. I had finally convinced my husband he could make some out of wooden 4 x 4's when Mom said we could use her old metal posts which had been uprooted due to a new garage. After getting them home I painted them and got the lines set up. I was in business.

I am so weird that the most impressive thing that I remember from the 2005 movie version of War of the Worlds is not over-emoting Tom Cruise, creepy Tim Robbins, or screaming Dakota Fanning but the scene where all the sheets were on the clothesline in the backyards and the wind was blowing so hard they were snapping. Now that is some fresh sheets.

When I was young we lived in an apartment complex in Maryland. It was the 1960's. There was a laundry room for the tenants to use. I loved the smell of the laundry room. Especially in the winter. The humid bleach smell was a sharp contrast against the brisk winter smell and would draw us into the laundry room to thaw until we were sent out by someone who was probably afraid we were going to stick each other into the dryer and turn it on.

Besides doing laundry I also enjoy ironing. I even ironed my boy's clothes when they were toddlers. Even if I don't have the latest fashion (which I don't) I can at least be clean and pressed. Mom taught me how to iron Dad's shirts when I was in the sixth grade. They were cotton shirts at that time. We used starch. A crisp pressed cotton shirt is a thing of beauty. I showed my boys how to press their shirts when they were in high school. They may not know how to cook but they know how to go out without wrinkles.