The Zen of the Clothesline: Letting It All Hang Out

Here in my neighborhood, where our yards average about 200 square feet, and the tall Victorian houses keep that precious little bit of space mostly in their shade all day, we live with little privacy outdoors. What happens in one yard happens in all our yards. For the most part, it has built a remarkable sense of community among those of us whose yards abut. We share the English pointer's early morning "Let me back in now!" barks (staccato, one long gruff shout, followed by two shorter, appeasing hiccups), the smoke from the barbecues which make even vegetarian me long for pork ribs and bratwurst, the raised pit "campfires" with the girls next door, complete with s'mores and fireflies. And we all hang out our laundry as soon as the temperatures allow.

But there are rules about hanging out your laundry, which you learn as soon as you try it. There are some I've watched the neighbors learn, basics such as the load limit of clotheslines AND clothesline poles! Yes. Not only can ropes snap under the weight of weight laundry, but those aluminum supports are not as strong as steel apparently. The most important rule, however, is more existential than circumstantial: One must never hang one's underwear outside, with the possible exception of sports bras.

It was the girls next door who actually articulated this and with astounding vehemence and clarity on the first day their moms were so awesomely naive as to clip their little panties to the line in full view of all of us who have been watching them grow up for years and may not possibly have realized until now that they wore underwear. Yes. In the intimacy of our neighborhood, we also get to hear the domestic squabbles that keep us nicely cognizant of the Mr. Rogerly fact that, "Everyone argues sometimes." This particular reminder of the fact that every family has its own deep, dark secrets ran as a series of falsetto trills overlaying a repetitive bass line: "You humiliated me! You showed everyone my underwear!" No one, to the best of my knowledge, has hung out underwear since that summer evening's eavesdropping.

In Egypt, everyone hangs out their clothing. I loved that. It may reveal the size of my aesthetic sensibility to confess that I was more enraptured by all the colorful flags hanging from the windows of Cairo's tallest, oldest apartment buildings and festooning the flat rooftops of Egyptian cities than I was by pyramids or sphinxes; to Egyptians in particular my fascination was probably perplexing, if not disturbing somehow. ("Why do you think this weird American woman keeps asking me about the laundry lines?" the taxi driver may have been asking the other taxi driver as they leaned toward each other out their open car windows, pretending to ask directions.) Egypt's climate is as dry as it comes. Air drying wet fabric only makes sense, right?

But I come from Boulder, Colorado, another very dry place on the planet, except during the monthly storm, either rain or snow depending on the month. When I bought my first house in Boulder, I wanted to plant a few trees in its shadeless yard. (Trees, of course, aren't native to a place without water. Early photographs of Boulder show a settlement with few trees and all of those few along the banks of the creek that runs through what is now the town. Understandably, the first settlers built their homes and businesses along the same creek, in the shade.) I didn't know yet how dry it was there. I had moved there from Seattle, by way of Madison, two of the dampest places in the country, and I was going to grow trees in my yard, preferably, sugar maples like we had in the northwoods of Wisconsin. The kind you can tap to make maple syrup in the spring. And so, a day after a fluke storm at the end of October dumped a foot of snow on us, I went out in the renewed 70 degree sunshine with my shovel to dig a big hole for a tree, thinking the ground, usually hard as rock (I mean, the place is named "Boulder" for a reason!) might be softened.

The foot of snow, I kid you not, had indeed softened the "soil," if you can call it such. My spadefuls showed me the line of saturation, how deeply the snowmelt had soaked into the soil. That foot of snow moistened the "soil" for nearly two inches one day after it fell to earth and then disappeared under the relentless sun we all loved. That was when I learned about "trans-evaporation," the phenomenon whereby snow falling in a very arid climate evaporates into the air before it can subside gratefully into the earth. This is why the few native trees that did grow in Boulder were ones like silver maples that grow with very shallow root systems that creep along the surface of the "soil," where there's some chance of finding water. I was never going to grow sugar maples, not unless I put in an extensive and costly irrigation system in my yard. That was the end of my syrup production.

So. Very dry in Boulder. So very dry in Boulder. (This repetive speech pattern cannot help but remind me of how David Whyte reads his own, wonderful poetry in his rolling British voice.) But so very dry in Boulder and still no one hangs out their laundry, not their sheets not their towels not their expensive yoga outfits or their state of the art running shirts and certainly not their underwear. Hanging out laundry, you see, takes time, and time in a city of the well-to-do and the amazingly fit is not best spent in domestic chores; time is for enhancing oneself, displaying oneself, playing the game known as working-out, not working. You can dump your wet items in the dryer and push the digital switch and they'll be dry when you're back from your marathon, ready for you to slip into stylishly for your post-marathon sushi. Uh huh!

But in Egypt, even the well-to-do hang out their laundry. I stayed in a beautiful apartment in Cairo, belonging to the parents of a friend of my daughter, and even this modern and immaculate, spacious and lovely private home had a clothes rack strung outside a fourth floor window. There was a washer in the utility room, but no dryer. At that point, I fell in love with Cairo.

Hanging clothes is a ritual, a meditation. It suits me far better than any religious ritual I've yet sampled. My mom, when I was really little, used to hang out all of the little dresses her four daughters went through every week, the shirts my dad wore to the office every day, and the dresses and aprons she favored, all cotton, all heading to the ironing basket after their time swinging in the summer breezes on the backyard clothesline. I don't know if she found it pleasing; I was too small to think of asking her, and by the time I was older, we, like everyone else on the block, had a clothes dryer, and no one hung their laundry out anymore. But I remember the slow rhythmic movements she made as she did the task, while we four little girls pumped our chubby legs earnestly higher and higher on the swingset, and I think she must have experienced what I might call the Zen of it. Could you be as graceful as she was and not be experiencing the serenity of immersion in the simple moment?

I rediscovered clotheslines when we were spending some summer time living in a castle in the French region of La Dordogne, a real English castle complete with a drawbridge and the smarmiest moat full of the largest, most disgusting fish I'd ever seen. While the children were delightedly rowing around and around the moat in an old wooden rowboat that June, I was learning how to hand wash and hand out our limited clothing in the little yard we had inside the castle grounds. I fell in love with clotheslines then, and I've brought back the habit from France, first to Boulder, then to Madison, where I found some afficiandoes of the art in my new neighbors.

But we don't hang out our underwear, here or in Egypt for that matter. That's why we have those little collapsible clothes racks and retractable lines that pull out from the wall over our washing machines. Way out in the Sinai Desert, running out of clothing, I was doing my best to wash out critically needed items in a small basin of water. I hung them out on what passed as a front porch, with my usual satisfaction, wiped my hands on my pants legs and prepared to go to dinner. I was called back by my daughter, who'd lived there long enough to know what was acceptable and what was not in the culture.

"Uh, Mums, I think it'd be better if maybe you didn't hang your underwear out here in public, ya know what I mean?" she asked so politely.

Oh yeh. How could I forget. I quickly gathered all the small pieces and draped them over pieces of bamboo inside my little hut. Some things are the same in every culture.