When I first got here, I was almost physically incapable of putting up a load of laundry less than eight feet from a busy sidewalk. It didn't matter whether it was under- or over-garments, somehow giving passers-by such a clear view of my exceedingly modest wardrobe stretched me to yet another limit. And yet it was, "adapt or don't adapt," and for the millionth time in the last few decades, my ingrown WASP proprieties went the way of the wind. In this household, virtually none of the laundry is white. Turquoise, bright red and yellow washcloths and cloth napkins line up over the flowerboxes like prayer flags, and a rainbow of tee shirts, trousers, socks and skirts either hang limply in the calm, or fly horizontal in storms. All of this is clearly visible from the front room, a slow motion version of watching clothes in a dryer.
Yeah, talk about releasing. Not all of it has been dramatic, like what I experienced the other day. Much of it has been happening, itself slow motion, over the last three or four decades. Virtually everything that would have elicited the words, "I couldn't do that," I have done. Virtually everything that my proper great-aunts in their blue linen dresses and pearl necklaces would have shunned, I seem to have either embraced, or at least gotten used to. It's been downward mobility on a monumental scale or, looked at another way, a shift from the paradigm of one side of my family heritage to another side. Those stalwart Canadians on the trek west probably had few opportunities to wash clothes at all, and dried clean laundry anywhere it could hang free. Once settled on a farmstead near Winnipeg, an actual clothesline must have seemed the height of luxury. So it is in that spirit that I bless this front porch line and the fact that I have pioneering forebears. We may be heading into a time where their practical courage will stand me in better stead than the civilized niceties that I seem to have been slowly shedding.
