Clothesline.

Laundry is one of the more mundane things in life. I was hanging clothes on the line this week and I suppose some folks would, beratingly, call me obsessive/compulsive about the way that I did it, but this is very simply the way that I think.

Let me back up a little...

I often hear people describe things, just general stuff—I'm talking water cooler chit-chat or church pot-latch dinner conversations—and I'll start feeling like I am from another planet. These common, everyday things are so not my experience. For example, I will hear some mom say that she can hardly wait for school to start so that the kids will be out of her hair. I cannot relate. Or some guy will say that he can't go fishing because his wife is making him finish her Honey-do List this weekend. Really? That is completely outside the realm of my experience. Where do these wives get this power? I would never be able to get my husband to ever agree to a Honey-do List, especially if it would mean sacrificing something that he wanted to do.

I'd say that I have a hard time relating to about a quarter of scenarios offered as examples by motivational speakers and in sermons. Doing things that are normal stuff for others, I will be attacked for. I once had a small, well-contained, perfectly legal leaf fire burning, when Jeannine, the demon-possessed neighbor, called the fire department on me. The firemen drove right past our place at first; the driver said he had driven past three larger leaf and brush fires on the way to this call and had had a hard time finding this fire. He wondered why it had been phoned in.
I have a lot of stories like that. I'm totally legal. I'm totally innocent. I'm totally attacked by hypocrites who do far worse. That is my reality.

But today's blog is about the clothesline.


At this time of year, past the autumnal equinox, the clothesline gets only a few hours of midday sun at the western end. Due to the position of a towering water oak, the east end gets less. I hang the slow-to-dry heavy socks and jeans at the western end and the quick drying polyesters at the east. This is normal for me and makes sense. It is not something I stopped and contemplated, I just did it. Everything gets dry this way. If jeans are hung on the east end, they will have damp crotches and pockets whist the flimsy stuff on the western front would have been dry much earlier.

I don't get why anyone would think that is odd. I think making jokes about "getting shed" of your kids when school starts is odd.



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