Home for Clotheslines

Good Morning -

Oh, it's Sunday and I've just spent a couple of hours organizing my My Pictures folder.

To be sure, there are "better" things I should (someone else's idea) have done with those two hours, but it's what I found myself doing and something I've been meaning to do for a long time, so it feels good to have it done. Maybe the myriad things I thought I might do today will find themselves being done months from now when I find myself inexplicably working on them instead of whatever is on my to-do list in that future moment.

Let's talk about the Virgen.

One of the things I had planned to get done yesterday that actually got done was laundry. I had spent the week in that unfortunate laundry grey zone in which I had a basket of clean clothes that I hadn't put away that slowly got surrounded by and mixed in with my dirty clothes from throughout the week that I couldn't put in my basket because it was full of clean clothes that I hadn't yet put away.

By yesterday what I had was a small layer of clean clothes buried beneath dirty clothes with a layer in between that, at one point, might have belonged to either the clean or dirty group but was declared dirty by virtue of being the boundary between the clean and dirty.

I salvaged the clean that I could and took the other two loads downstairs to be washed.

Washing two loads of laundry means drying two loads of laundry, which had me acutely aware of the giant energy suck that is a clothes dryer.

While I miss almost nothing of Tucson (save some people and raspados (which might exist here, but, happily, it's cool enough right now that I don't want one and so haven't gone looking), I do miss the clothesline I had in our yard. I don't miss the fire ants that bit me as I hung and removed my clothes. I don't miss the mosquitoes that sucked my blood as I tended to my laundry. I don't miss the burrs and stickers that were our "yard", but I do miss the ability to hang clothes.

All of this dryer contemplation brought me to clarity that my dream home needs clothesline capacity. Ideally (and, since this is the dream home we're discussing here...), there is a clothes line out in the yard, positioned such that it gets sun and breezes, and one in the full basement for those times when it's too wet or too cold to hang clothes outside.

Our current living establishment doesn't lend well to either of these scenarios. Our yard is shared with the other 4-plex tenants, all of whom have big, laxly disciplined dogs, and it's more work than it's worth to try to negotiate with them about hanging a line for the four months we have left here.

Those four months we have left will get increasingly colder, which in the dream home means clothes on the downstairs line, but here means clothes in the dryer. Our basement is small (the length of one room), so it's not enough space to hang a line and have the clothes dry.

I know that soon, soon enough we will once more have a yard that lends itself to a clothesline. Until then, there's the dryer and awareness of how great it will be with the line.

I love the smell and feel of line-dried clothes. I love how it keeps me up on my laundry because one can only hang so many loads on the line at once and one must factor in the time needed for them to dry on the line. It creates a presence with the task of laundry that doesn't exist when simply moving blobs of tangled clothes from basket to machine to machine to basket.

Here's to that. Here's to line-dried clothes. Here's to presence with tasks. Here's to yards and basements capable of drying clothes and here's to staying caught up with laundry.