Wash Day

Well, I know Cupcake etiquette should probably dictate that I wait at least a day to post after another Cupcake but Edie's posts on laundry have really conjured up so much. Laundry on a clothesline is the perfect image of spring and a harbinger of summer to come: the snap of crisp, flapping sheets on the line, the clean smell that fresh air-dried laundry brings to the house. I have wanted a clothesline for my entire married life and gosh darn it, this spring I am determined to have one!











Monday was traditionally the "wash day" of the domestic week and tends to be the day of choice now for me to wash towels and sheets. But I'm in my new laundry room/mud room every day because I love the space. Besides, it is a room of accomplishment. [Meanwhile, ironing small linens (not shirts!) is something I love to do but never seem to make time to do.] I am actually writing this in the wee hours of Monday morning, partly because with the time change I'm still awake. As you can see from the photos in this entry, I often photograph clotheslines in my travels.

Mrs. Washalot writes about laundry things and I learned tonight what a linen press is (and of course, blogged about that over at In the Pantry). [And realized that is what we have in two of our upstairs bedrooms in New Hampshire, as stated in the original contractor's bill from 1813--so that's what those shallow shelves are for!]

In another website worth further exploration, LaundryList.org, I was reminded that one of my favorite poets, Jane Kenyon, wrote at least three poems about laundry, which are included in Otherwise~New and Collected Poems [Graywolf Press: 1996].

Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of 48 and was the wife of Poet Laureate, Donald Hall. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan she spent twenty years in New Hampshire, coming at the age of 28 to Eagle Pond Farm, where Hall's family had lived for several generations. She wrote about the ordinary and the domestic in a lucid and profound way, her poems spare but painterly, like a Dutch interior or still life. She understood the rural New Hampshire soul, perhaps infused by her own struggle with depression, because she was so attuned to its natural world. This evening, Otherwise is back on my bedside table. I will savor each poem again, like a gift reopened and remembered. [Hall wrote a memoir of his life with Kenyon, The Best Day The Worst Day (Houghton Mifflin: 2005) that, if you like memoirs, especially of artists, I highly recommend.]

Here are three laundry poems by Jane Kenyon, the last clearly written about spring--come soon!

Wash Day

How it rained while you slept! Wakeful,
I wandered around feeling the sills,
followed closely by the dog and cat.
We conferred, and left a few windows
open a crack.

Now the morning is clear
and bright, the wooden clothespins
swollen after the wet night.

The monkshood has slipped its stakes
and the blue cloaks drag in the mud.
Even the daisies -- good-hearted
simpletons -- seem cast down.

We have reached and passed the zenith.
The irises, poppies, and peonies, and the old
shrub roses with their romantic names
and profound attars have gone by
like young men and women of promise
who end up living indifferent lives.

How is it that every object in this basket
got to be inside out? There must be
a trickster in the hamper, a backward,
unclean spirit.

The clothes -- the thicker
things -- may not get dry by dusk.
The days are getting shorter. . . .
You'll laugh, but I feel it --
some power has gone from the sun.

The Clothes Pin

How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!

Wash

All day the blanket snapped and swelled
on the line, roused by a hot spring wind....
From there it witnessed the first sparrow,
early flies lifting their sticky feet,
and a green haze on the south-sloping hills.
Clouds rose over the mountain....At dusk
I took the blanket in, and we slept,
restless, under its fragrant weight.

from Otherwise~New and Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon [Graywolf Press: 1996]