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| My Beloved Washing Line at Home. |
Looking back after hanging up laundry on one of the first sunny days in March. The wind catches the sheets and they lift. The gentle movement is transfixing, meditative. The greenery of garden foliage around, the depths of the soft blue sky above. There is a distinct pleasure in hanging up, and seeing, laundry drying on a line.
I am glad to find that the subject has become a repeated feature in paintings (see here for a wonderful collection.) Perhaps it is the clothing and material itself; the hanging to dry bearing to the sky the worn-in, the laboured-in, each wash a bleaching, hard assault on the cotton. The week's workclothes rid of their imprints and miring. A degree of completeness; a task done, or at least a task in a restful, passive stage.
It has presumably existed since the invention of human clothing. There are very few acts in the first century of the second millennium in daily life that link ourselves with such early ancestors, enacted by each generation in each place clothes were worn with bare changes made to the act itself.
The everyman harnesses the power of the weather. Each time the laundry is hung to dry, appreciation and respect is renewed for a shift in the clouds, a gap in the rain, the open and close of the seasons. Like saving rainwater for watering plants, it is of few acts that puts you in relation with the heavens, with the atmosphere.
In modern day society it is also a rare act free of charge, owing no-one.
Despite all this, gushing about laundry on the line has people thinking me boring, inane, or simple. I can't hear them over the flap of the duvet cover in a late afternoon breeze.
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| Drying clothes on a tree in Dartmoor. It rained on it all overnight. |
