By Anne Fox
Like Simone de Beauvoir, I have compared housework to the torture of Sisyphus. Yet once in a while, when an afternoon turns golden, I remember the outcome of an irresistible impulse.
Despite my many years of kinship with a clothes dryer, long after I had forgotten that the sun had more to do than make me hot and miserable, I was moved one day to hang the wash outside on our unused clothesline. Why? Perhaps enlightenment illuminated my thoughts about Nature as the afternoon sparkled, butterflies hovered, and bees were buzzing themselves into insensibility. Maybe one bird chirped and another answered. Maybe it was spring, and daffodils were in bloom. Maybe I remembered Wordsworth, or thin cloud wisps above reminded me of a poem I had once written about thin cloud wisps. Whatever the reason, I opened my washing machine, eager for its wet contents to get a breath of fresh air. Never mind the dryer nearby at the ready.
The wash, a week’s worth of four people’s belongings, filled the large plastic basket we kept on our back porch. Today I was Mother, going outside to hang the family wash, as in olden days before the easy indulgence of a dryer. I felt an unexplained desire to ally myself with the pioneer past. A romantic notion, though my next-door neighbor always hung out her wash to dry, and I regarded her as quite ordinary and without romantic notions.
The basket was heavy beyond expectation, but then I remembered I usually threw clothes into the dryer by the handful, never aware of the weight of the whole. By the time I reached the clothesline at the edge of the yard, my arms ached. But never mind, I was Mother. I bent, grasped a garment and shook it out, straightened up . . . and saw I had no clothespins. For all the years I had kept the clothesline waiting at the boundary of the yard, I hadn’t kept clothespins. Or had I? A faint memory stirred . . . about a drawer—yes, a catchall drawer in the kitchen, repository of many years’ accumulation of what no one had the courage to cull.
Crisp with age, the ancient cellophane-wrapped package of clothespins from the drawer crackled in my hands. Again outside to the basket of wet clothes and the clothesline. I bent and stretched and hung up garment after garment, reaching and bending and stretching, feeling the free rhythm in my body as if I had truly been made for such a task. Eventually, the twinges in my spine became metronomically reliable and appropriate. Oh, what I had missed all these years. Clothespins fulfilled their mission so that the shirts whipped in the wind, the sheets billowed, the sunlight danced off the buttons of my daughters’ blouses. Freshness emanated from every fiber of fabric.
I took to humming a tune from Oklahoma. But somehow the wind wasn’t sweepin’ down the plain. Rather, it had shifted while I tended to clothespins and clothes, and I felt an edge of chill. I looked up and saw that the thin wisps of clouds had gathered into thickness, that the sun, so aglow not long before, cast a now bleak beam as a willful wind propelled clouds over its face.
One more piece to hang—that was on my mind when the first raindrops fell. By then the clouds had reached the horizon, where a silver strip many miles away reminded me that the sun was still on the job.
What a stunning betrayal by Mother Nature, but even as rain crept into the collar of my T-shirt, no way would I take down the clothes. They wanted fresh air—let them have fresh air, and a little fresh rain to boot.
I kicked aside the plastic laundry basket and bolted for the house, shooting a glance at my neighbor’s backyard. Not a handkerchief on her line, not a sock, not a shirt, not a diaper. Her big family—a baby plus three more kids, a husband, and a brother-in-law—required that she wash every day, sometimes twice a day, but not today. What did she know that I didn’t?
By the time I was in my house, I decided an assessment was due. Bolstered by illusions, goodwill at heart, I had hung the clothes in the sunshine and fresh air, and with what reward?
Through the window of the back door I saw my laundry flapping in the wind and rain, dancing the Lindy Hop in mockery of my efforts. Simone spoke to truth when she wrote that with housework “the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.” If fresh air, sunshine, and butterflies wouldn’t free me from thinking I was doomed to endure the suffering of Sisyphus, what would?
I patted my dryer.
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Anne Fox
Anne Fox has been the longtime copyeditor for Write Angles, newsletter of the California Writers Club, and Berkeley Branch, and has copyedited for other publications as well. She does copyediting for writers of fiction and nonfiction. Her written work has appeared online, in anthologies, and in other forms of print.