Clothesline and Clothes Pins

Day 256: Clothesline and Clothes Pins

Sun streaming through bright white sheets. The breeze making a line of shirts and pants dance, catching a woman's long dark hair, shaping her skirts to her slender legs. Children playing hide and seek amid sweet-smelling, clean laundry. A clothesline.

At the eco-resort where we stayed in Costa Rice, tourists were invited to hang their wet things on nature's clothes drier: hemp rope strung between cedar posts. What could be an easier way to reduce your environmental footprint than to let nature do the work? Isn't there something supremely absurd about using fossil fuels to perform osmosis?

In theory, yes. In fact, what could be more irritating than attaching 50 socks to a clothesline, returning four hours later and having to reattach them because the inside didn't get dry? What would more uncomfortable than stiff sheets off the line? What could be heavier than a laundry basket full of wet clothing? What could be more time consuming than waiting for laundry to dry? What could be more embarrassing than having your stained old bras and underwear visible to every passenger vehicle that drives down Packard Road? What could be more frustrating than a twisted and bent line that keeps sliding down the tree to which it's affixed, dipping your formerly clean clothing in leaf mold? And what could be easier than pivoting your torso to shift the clothes from the washer to the drier?

I comfort myself with the thought that hanging my clothes on the line will not buy the Earth and all its species one more minute, not unless my neighbors start doing it too. And their neighbors, and theirs, and theirs. I hung my clothes on the line for several years, and no one followed suit except Jess - and I'm guess she would have done so, with or without me.

Perhaps if I had a better set-up. A pulley system that would allow me to stand on the back porch and pull empty line towards me, so that I wouldn't have to move a step stool, for example. An apron full of clean new clothes pins. A secluded backyard.

But I have none of these things. All I have is this old clothesline, which fell to the ground a few days ago when our fence got knocked down in a wind storm. Will I pick it up, untangle it, sort out the broken clothes pins and start over? Or will it be one more casualty of the stuff project?

Need you ask?