The Clothesline - A Spring Rite of Passage

by Angela Sanford

   It’s April and the temperatures are flipflopping daily, the sun is chased by intermittent rain clouds, and the mud dries so fast on the bottom of my footwear that it leaves a trail of dirt across my kitchen floor.

   I look out the window, wondering if it is time yet. I am easily deceived by the sunshine and the changing grass, yellow and dull to green and brilliant. It looks warm outside, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to hang my first load of laundry on the clothesline to dry.

The day has come and I am so eager to get the line out that I forget that the clothes pins and my outside table are not yet where they belong from spring to fall. They are inside the garage and I need to return the laundry to the house until I gather them to begin.

   It’s just as well because the sun tricked me into thinking it was warm out; what a fool I am – I’m old enough to know better. The air is not just fresh but crisp and cool on my bare arms so I also grab a light jacket and return to the task at hand.

As I stand before the line, I listen to the wheel turn as the line is drawn. I hear the birds chirp their early morning song and I close my eyes and take a deep breath, inhaling the scents of the day, longing t have these scents embedded into my clothes, my towels and, best of all, my bed sheets when I collect them at the end of the day to make my bed.

   I relive the years of my youth, when my Gram had her second clothesline behind the shed where she hung her bedsheets. First she lowered the line by removing the notched pole that would hoist the line in the air while being pitched into the ground midway down the line.

   As we ran for hide and seek and tag, we had to be cautious of running when near the pole, careful not to bump into it and allow the clean laundry to reach the ground. Fast forward to my own clothesline, when I hung the three miniature baseball uniforms, for passersby to see. I even took a photo of that line one morning as a moment to remember. 

   Patti, not to be named in full, stopped me in the village a few days later and while I thought she was going to comment on the line of baseball clothing, she, instead, wanted to commend me on my skills in hanging clothes “as they should be hung.” Pants were hung by the bottom of the legs, followed by shirts by their waist, underwear and then socks. I had never given any consideration for the particulars in how I hung laundry and thought it an odd comment, but, apparently, I was modelling the form of an earlier generation according to her. Perhaps I had paid more attention to my grandmother and my mother than I had thought. 

   Last weekend was the initial laundry rite of passage for this year. I hung the clothes, after finding my pins, table, and donning a light sweater and as I folded them from the line later in the day that familiar clean, fresh scent meant assuredly that spring must finally be here!