Hanging out the washing

I’ve joined Threads and have “met” some lovely and interesting and varied people. In one of my little exchanges, mentioning what I’d done so far this morning, I said I’d been hanging out the washing. Later, as I hung out my second load, I was thinking about how often I’d written about putting the laundry out, especially during lockdown when it was a very pleasant and almost meditative thing to do.

This sounds strange now, but there was something about pegging out the different wet items on the very wonky rotary dryer. I would think of my mum hanging out clothes when I was a child. I expect at first she would have washed things by hand and squeezed them through a mangle, but later we had a simple washing machine  – still using the wringer though. We had a long line suspended between concrete posts running down the garden (the line was running, the concrete posts were resolutely stationary) I would also think of how my cousin put out her washing, completely differently from me, and another close friend who had  her own method.

I wrote some poems in my head about hanging out the washing while I was doing it during lockdown – I did write some of them down, but they didn’t ever work as well on paper as they had when I was thinking about them. The rotary dryer is still wonky, one day its line will break, but I have a spare, ready and waiting, when needed.