Poetry Friday: A Clothesline Poem

 Happy Poetry Friday ya'll! Second time round on a laundry poem today. Every time I go outside I see my clothesline and think that I ought to try poeting about it so, here I am today, giving it a whirl. Hope the weekend treats you well and that you enjoy all manner of fabulous summer moments.

Image by atrphoto via Flickr

The Laundry Parade

Laundry marches down my clothesline, post-dawn
Before the egg's cracked or bacon begins to spit
In the cool morning breeze they are drawn up
And shuttled one by one into their given spots,
Each damp shoulder tucked against his fellow's
All day they are there in an obedient row
Stretching from the backdoor to the garage
Flowing and snapping in ceaseless formation,
One grand color coordinated battallion,
Today a troop of brave, bleached whites
Yesterday a platoon of red, all glowing in the sun
When I take them down at dusk and finger them,
They are crisp from standing at attention
For hours in the sun, their very fibers thick
With all the remembered effort and so as a release
I shake each playfully in the evening breeze,
Wiggle them and dance their various stiff joints.
And then I lap them into restful accordion folds
Soft, fragrant layers of rest, all piled together
In the wicker basket I carry in for the night.

You can find all the other entries for Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading. Hop on over and check them out!

Peonies and Microwaves

Just put a load of laundry out on the clothesline, and I can see it out the window, hanging limply in the sunshine. I have done far too little clothesline using this spring so far. It is finally getting consistently warm and sunny though so I have decided to put my toe over the line, test fate and plan on hanging things out. Seems like the appropriate summer equation, cut the electric bill by giving the dryer a break and then jack it up a little by using the window unit air conditioners. Right? We haven't hit the time of year when you feel the need for blasts of cool air so, so far I haven't turned on a single window unit....but it's early yet. We shall see what we shall see.

The microwave died and I need to figure out what model to buy. So far, after a very small amount of review reading it looks like microwaves aren't terribly easy to rate. Most models get vaguely positive comments and all of them are below five stars. Is this a message from The Great Beyond to give up the radiation machine and live back-to-the-basics like my pal Nutmeg? I'm not sure I'm listening. I am lazy. I forget to thaw out meat for dinner. I heat water for a single cup of tea. I like reheating leftovers without dirtying any pans.

I can hardly believe it is June already. Time for the roses. My peonies are just finishing, the surprise peonies that were here already when we moved in. There were two varieties. A fragrant almost white, barely pink and then a deep lipstick one with gold stamens but no scent. Next year I plan to move them over to the flower beds I'm creating in the middle of the lawn. This will be the first week of our new CSA share. We will walk down the street to pick up our box and meet the folks from the farm. Lookin' forward to it!

The tomato plants have all migrated outdoors at this point, the corn I planted, right in the lawn (I am bonkers!) is coming up and there are lush, potato plants, climbing out of the soil in the two potato bins I made. Now I just need those late bloomer pole beans I put in the ground to get a move on and show their heads. Time to climb boys! Summer is a comin' in!

Ode to a Clothesline

Well, hello world! Here I am typing away for what somehow feels like the first "real" time in my new house. The office where I will be rattling off my posts is a real place with our big desk all moved in and the computery types all humming away with their cords sashaying in writhing company behind them. The room has a door to shut when A works from home and there is even a closet where we can hide papers and electric bits we don't want the children to find! We will someday have a little loveseat here so that A and I can snuggle while we watch Instant Netflix movies at night after we put the kids down and we are also searching for a swank metal filing system to hold all our important papery bits but for now its the desk, the chair I'm sitting on and a lot of dreams. But, it will be a fine place to write...dreamy places are the best for writing.

I never really meant to go on about the office. It just happened. What I really meant to tell you all about was my new clothesline!!!! YAY!!!!!

Four cheers for A who got all handy this weekend and cleaned a gutter, mowed the lawn and hung my clothesline for me. I am so very happy, and wow did he please me when he did all that stuff for me. I would have been forever doing them myself.

It is deluxe to have my own line for hanging out clothes in the summer when there is still the occasional hot breeze and loads of sunshine to freshen all the baby things I'm planning to pin up. I think I looked out the window about five times an hour today just to make sure my first load of wash was indeed still out there flapping, picturesquely in the wind. Twenty shades of fabulous. Nothing less.

Now I need to make or buy at an estate sale a pretty old peg bag for my clothespins....and uh...buy more because I didn't get enough to do a whole line of clothes. Heh.

One of the most exciting things about buying an old house is all the little quirky bits you discover as you live in the home. I have to admit this is also one of the "too exciting" bits occasionally. In our dear house for example, the dryer is not vented to the outdoors, it just blows directly into the basement which means: 

1. The basement is often the hottest part of the house.

2. There are wads of lint coating the wall behind the dryer and all the floor and floating about waiting to leap into our lungs! Yay!

3.The basement is extremely humid...not good for basements anyhow as they tend to get moldy but especially bad if you're trying to dry your clothes. They never get dry.

Did I mention that I love my new clothesline?