Clotheslines

I heard author, Sarah Weeks, speak at Teachers College Saturday Reunion at the beginning of the month. She encouraged the audience to look around and pay attention-something many of us participating in the March Slice of Life Challenge are putting to the test with more regularity these days, I’m sure.

Sarah recommended paying attention to teachers. She said “they do really weird stuff.” She went on to describe a story that had me laughing out loud. During a school visit, Sarah watched as kids were filing in with their teachers for her presentation. She watched as one teacher formed an L with her fingers and placed it on her forehead, not once…but three times as they waited for all of the classes to settle in. Sarah described wondering what this class had done for their teacher to silently call them all “losers” three times. She went on to tell us that she went through her author spiel and then hurried over to the “L” teacher. She said something like, “I just have to know what happened when your class was settling down?” The teacher must have been confused, so Sarah made an L with her fingers and put it to her forehead.

“Oh!” The teacher said, “That’s our signal to lower our voices.”

During her keynote, Sarah also threw out the idea of studying people’s clotheslines. This too, she informed, can tell you a lot about a person.

As she shared this tip, I was immediately brought back to my childhood. We were a clothesline family. I remember waiting impatiently for my mom to hang out the laundry after every load…and there were many-we were a family of five. I also remember the annoyance of being the one asked to pull the clothes in once dry, or even worse, when it was about to rain.

Our neighbors, Bill and Anita, were also clotheliners. My Mom and Anita both had a system. At our house, kid clothes got washed together, adult clothes, and then again by darks and lights. Anita’s laundry was sorted by item and size. All of the pants together. Then the shirts, with smaller articles of clothing finishing off the row.

The act of hanging out clothes often turned social. My mom would  end up chatting with Anita, or us kids would wander over and sit on Anita’s deck while she hung her clothes. How many nights, we all ended up in Bill and Anita’s yard chatting and chasing fireflies. Many of my childhood memories took place between our clothesline and Anita’s. Gathering worms after the rain or the sweet pink flowers that fell from Anita’s mimosa tree.

When I was in college, Anita passed away after a long battle with cancer. Her husband, Bill, was left to carry on the clothesline duties. He had a system all his own. I think his system may have involved waiting until he was in dire need of an article of clothing and then washing all of those items together. There were t-shirt days, where all of his white tees would be lined up on the line. Then sock days, each sock clipped with a single pin, looking like a row of birds sitting on a telephone wire. And then there was underwear day. These days were few and far between. What I learned about Bill, he had enough underwear to last him a long time. Those days always made me chuckle.