LINE DANCING

Laundry is not one of my favourite household tasks. Unlike baking or dusting or painting a room, laundry is one of those activities in which I find no pleasure. Doing laundry is just a chore. Unless the day is fine, of course, for on a fine day - the right kind of ‘fine’ - the kind of fine day when light breezes ruffle the trees and tickle pansies under the chin...on that kind of fine day, laundry becomes something different, something more, something enjoyable. On a fine day, I hang the laundry on the line. Certain members of my family roll their eyes and shake their heads, wondering aloud whether all of this pegging out and taking in doesn’t simply prolong the agony, extend the task and add to my labours. They may only be wondering aloud, but I answer their queries with a resounding ‘no!’ Freshly hung laundry smells wonderfully of damp fabric and vaguely of soap. As it dries, line laundry passes through a myriad of colour and pattern combinations which are of great interest to someone sitting on a chair in the shade, squeezing lemon juice into a glass of iced tea. Too, when laundry is pegged out and I am sitting in the shade, stirring lemon juice into iced tea (mesmerized by the well-choreographed line dance being performed at the bottom of my garden) and my children come along saying, “Hi, Mum.  What’cha doing?”  I can truthfully answer, “I’m doing laundry.”

  At length, the laundry will be dry and I will have the great pleasure of toting a basket across the lawn to retrieve our clothing from the line. If the fine day has become still, the laundry will be hanging in stiff folds, rough to the touch and temperamental to work. If, on the other hand, the fine day has remained fine, the laundry will be hanging in soft drapes, sweetly-scented by breezes carrying the fragrance of seasonal flowers and of newly mown grass. If it is the right time of day, the sun-warmed fabrics will also smell of heat. Who wouldn’t trade tumble-dried shirts for shirts which smell of such beauty?

  Folding line-dried laundry is an exercise in sensory delight: crisp smells waft up as the shirts and towels are shaken, rewarding the labourer with a satisfying ‘snap’; rough, sun-scoured fibres brush fingertips and forearms with warmth. Line-dried laundry seems to fold of its own accord, with ever so little direction from the one orchestrating the event, and stacks itself into a basket in tidy, well-ordered piles.

  There is excitement in hanging out laundry. One never knows what sort of trick the weather will play. Fine days can change their mind in a heartbeat, driving rain against line laundry, or gusting it into knotted lumps. Sudden dust devils sometimes leap onto still-damp whites, forcing a re-wash and another pegging out attempt. It once took two of us, adults both, to hang out the laundry on a sweltering July afternoon in Manitoba. The second we took clothespegs in hand, a searing wind arose and began ripping T-shirts and bathing suits from our grasp, tossing them unceremoniously into maples and  the caragana hedge. This was a wind which scorched and prickled the skin, a wind which tore moisture from both laundry and eyeballs. When we had battled our way to the bottom of the line and had forced the last sock to remain fixed in place, we found the items at the top of the line were more than dry enough to take in. All the while, that arid, temperamental wind taunted us, jerking shorts away just as we reached up to retrieve them and launching blouses into the sky simply for the pleasure of it. Prairie winds are fickle, for the very next wash day, we pegged more of our washing in the still mugginess of the morning. The clothes hung listlessly immobile for two full days and nights before we relented, unpegged our still sodden washing and toted it off to the Laundromat where we heaved it into the coin-operated dryer.

  People exclaim, they wax poetic over the experience of sliding between line-dried sheets. This is a rich pleasure, to be sure, but is eclipsed by sliding in between rain-washed, line-dried sheets. The next time you see a raincloud approaching, the next time the sky darkens and roils, the next time fat, determined droplets smack into the pavement, sending up miniature clouds of summer dust, pull your sheets from the washing machine and peg them out in anticipation of rain-wash. You will likely have to wait until tomorrow afternoon before you can take your sheets in and tuck them around your bed, but there is no scent, no sensation quite like falling asleep between such sheets. I am certain Heaven’s laundry smells and feels like this. If it doesn’t, I’m sending mine out.

  Because today is not particularly fine (rain, rain, go away), two beasts of domestic burden are presently churning away in my basement, one washing and the other drying my family’s laundry. I will fold jeans and sort socks, I will stack tea towels and pile pyjamas. I will sit on my chesterfield, drawing items from the basket, working distractedly, for laundry is not one of my favourite household tasks. I have just loaded my sheets to be washed...perhaps I shall peg them out in this less-than-delightful weather, to be brought in several days from now and savoured