“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” William Jennings Bryan

Friday, September 5, 2014

August 5, 2014





The dryer broke the other day and it’s so old that the repairman said the parts have been discontinued, but he’d see if he could locate them through his contacts and over the internet. Meanwhile we will not have a clothes dryer for the time being, and most likely we will need a new one. It can only break so many times, and there are only so many parts left out there in the ether.

So this morning as the sun was pushing up above the trees I was out hanging wash on a clothesline. It brought back memories of when my mom had an elaborate umbrella clothes line contraption that consisted of a pole with rows of lines between arms that reached out from the top center. My mom could turn it so that she never had to move, bringing the next set of empty lines to her.  It worked out well, especially for a family of six.

Our line is a bit simpler – a poly coated green line stretched between two trees, about 25’ long. We are only two people, so we don’t really need a whole lot more. And to be honest, I don’t know if they still make the umbrella like contraptions anymore. One thing I did notice was that the wooden clothespins we just bought were made of less wood and lighter springs than my mom’s of years ago. Back then hers were made to last; these clothes pins, after two days, are popping apart and also don’t have the spring power to clamp things down! Oh well. I should know by know that in America cheap is the quality people want.

While I was hanging up the bath towels, socks, shirts, etc I was reminded of a poem I once read years ago about how one could tell what kind of sex life a person had by the type and colour of underwear they hung on the line…it wasn’t a “dirty” poem, but one of  descriptive observation. Actually it was sort of deep. There were a lot of metaphors throughout the poem, but that’s not where I am going to go with this.

I think that if the poet had looked at our clothes line she wouldn’t have found much inspiration, and I sorta laughed to myself. I think if we did have hammocks and thongs and things we wouldn’t put them on the line for everyone to see anyway…I guess she was seeing an extroverts wash when the words came to her!

About the only thing one can tell about our wash is that fashion isn’t a big deal to us, and that we don’t much dress to go anywhere. Except for a few colourful pairs of socks, we just have plain stuff, most of it farm and animal stained, thread bare because we do not throw anything away until our underwear shows. I should say until our plain underwear shows!

So I am thinking that what we need to do is to hit the dollar store and buy the most bizarre and colorful underwear we can find and just hang it out there with a riding crop for the nosey world to see!  That will give the neighbors and visitors something to wonder about for a while…or the two of us 50 something’s may get a poem of our own. Or at least some funny looks!