The Clothes Line
Renée has been badgering me to put up a clothesline since we moved to this house ten years ago.
“The clothes always smell so nice” she will say.
“Yes, and they’re really scratchy.” I reply.
My real objection springs from the fact that I associate clotheslines with the tenement buildings in the mill town where I grew up. It was not the clotheslines themselves that bothered me, after all, in the 50’s nearly every family had one. Behind the mill-owned tenements though, the amount of line and laundry that flapped in tepid breezes were signal flags saying to me: “poor and dependent mill slaves live here.” (This impression may have been colored by my father’s leadership in the union at the mill.)
The women of the tenements wore sun dresses with crisp white aprons and reached high overhead to secure the wet clothing to the line. If there were two, or several, they chatted across the space that separated the porches. It was a kind of communion for them. They discussed the day, their children, and gossiped about goings on at the mill. Most were homemakers who only saw each other there, or at the little market next to the mill.
The image of lines of laundry is not a nostalgic one for me and I explained it to Renée. She has three brothers and six sisters so volumes of laundry say something different to her. The clotheslines of her youth were strung from crossbars attached to poles behind the farmhouse her parents had bought to free themselves of the city. That the farm also provided meat and vegetables, (albeit, through a great deal of shared labor,) was, and continues to be, a source of pride for her. Since that conversation when we see a clothesline she looks wistfully and says “Oh look Dear, poor white trash.” She artfully chides my memory that associates her past with that of “poor and dependent mill slaves.”
Finally, about a month ago, I gave in and together we strung a clothesline from our deck to a maple in the tree line behind our house. The clothesline has reels at either end. The user hangs an item and then pushes it out toward the opposite end, making room for the next. We chose this kind because the land slopes away from our deck and this arrangement makes it possible to hang the laundry from one spot while keeping the line level. It is the same arrangement as the tenements except that there, the far reel attached to poles that served all the floors of the building.
Since I am retired and Renée is not, it has fallen on me to be the clothesline‘s primary user. This has necessitated a reframing of attitude on my part. That is good, I have done a lot of reframing since I entered the leisure class. Our memories are of separate lives. It is time to build them for this one. While they remain scratchy, the clothes hung from the line really do smell nice.
