PENNYWISE
The Clothesline By Meredith Martin-Moats
My grandmother—short, chubby and silver haired—opened the hall closet and reached into the cloth sack hanging over the door, pulling out handfuls of clothespins and shoving them into the front pockets of her apron. With a laundry basket on her hip, she walked down the steps to the clothesline, hanging out my grandfather’s overalls and her polyester shirts on the line to dry. As she bent down to pick up the clothes and reached up to pin them to the line, her movements were rhythmic and hypnotic. Argyles and stripes, faded pinstripe denim, purple and green plaid flannels, whipped back and forth in the breeze. Her name was Golda Faye Taylor McElroy and this memory of her standing among drying fabrics remains forever vivid. I especially loved those days she washed sheets. Hanging nearly to the ground, I would run underneath them, pretending I was in a fort or castle. As cliché as it may sound now, and as mundane as such tasks must have felt to her then, there was something magical about the pop and whish of sheets in the wind. On those evenings when I spent the night, I’d fall asleep to the smell of the breeze buried deep in the fibers of the bedding.
contemplation, a word literally meaning “thoughtful observation.” Hanging clothes out to dry is a slow process involving the natural world, forcing you to go outside, listen to the birds, the wind in the trees or maybe just the neighbor’s lawn mower. It takes practice to slow down, and it’s not about the kind of practice that makes perfect. Sometimes it means having time to think about the laugher of your children. But let’s be real. Sometimes it just means more time to think about that mountain of unpaid bills. In the end, slowing down is about embracing the imperfect nature of just about everything. I feel it’s important to save resources, but what I love about the clothesline is that it helps me channel my inner grandma, connecting me to a woman who revealed to me the magic in the mundane. I am convinced that when a child sees fabrics blowing in the breeze it is part of their innate being to run under them, laughing.
I don’t want to over-romanticize my grandmother’s life, her tiny house, or her dirty laundry. I’m sure she would have loved to occasionally skip the trip to the clothesline and shove the wet clothes in an electric dryer. In many ways she lived what we might today call a green or zero-waste lifestyle. But it wasn’t because she knew or cared about global warming or the need to conserve energy. She just didn’t have much of a choice.
Green living has become a trend these days, with all kinds of products being “green washed” in an attempt to sell them. Oddly enough so-called green living can even be used as a status symbol, with certain products costing multiples times more than their more packaged, less organic counterpoints. So much of green marketing, it seems to me, misses the point. When we’re being convinced we need more money to live a less wasteful life, something has clearly gone awry. Green living—or as I prefer to somewhat jokingly call it, “Grandma-inspired living”—is generally about frugal decision-making and the practice of slowing down. Such thinking can feel counterintuitive to our fastpaced culture where convenience reigns supreme. What a clothesline lacks in convenience it makes up for in opportunities for 56 | savvy kids October 2012
Photo by Saira Khan
When I was younger I couldn’t articulate how much I loved her clothesline or the smell of the wind-blown sheets. But as I grew older, she passed away, and I gradually became an adult with my own dirty laundry, I began to crave a clothesline of my own. When living in Kentucky, my husband surprised me with one of those fancy clotheslines with pulleys, which ran from our porch to the neighboring fence. When we moved back to Arkansas he helped to build yet another, this one from scrap wood. And while I no longer had the energy to run underneath the bedding, I still loved to watch the endless whipping of the sheets, that constant rhythm of their movement—at turns both peaceful and violent—in the breeze.