Small Ways | Laundry Line

A length of cotton rope, tight between two posts. White cotton sheets, draped and dancing in the breeze. Glorious summer sun. This is what I anticipate when warmer seasons come. Sheets on the line, infused with scents of blossom and leaf, pressed by sunlight.

It speaks of simpler times. Before the bells and whistles and tumble dry. When the outdoors were as necessary as the indoors to complete the work. When you could lose yourself for a moment with the sun and birdsong between the lines, fresh air and all, basket at your feet.

Have you experienced this? Look, there’s your bed. On it are sheets and pillowcases. Outside is fresh air and sunshine. Is there a place for some cotton line? A bit of back or side yard for a clothesline proper? Or maybe there’s a place to string a single line from here to there, for pulling out just when it’s needed? (On a recent quiet California morning, I stepped outside the guest house where I was staying, to see a row of cotton shirts drying in the breeze from Victoria’s retractable line on her side terrace.) If you’ve neither of those, maybe there’s a deck, balcony, porch, or stoop (or snatch of lawn) were a wooden rack could stand in the moment and line dry the pillowcases at least?

As the heavy sun sank behind the treetops, I unpinned the pillowcases, dropped them into the basket, took the pins from the edges of the sheets, gently doubled them over themselves and draped them across my outstretched arm. I crossed the lawn toward the house as if carrying so much fancy yardage. The heady smell of summer filled the bedroom as I layered the sheets tight across the mattress, layered the quilt over top of all, and turned down the bed. All six pillows slipped into cases crisp and soft, somehow both, stacked three high each.

After a full day gone, when the house is slowly exhaling the daytime’s heat, when windows are open and dark and the incoming breeze is cool, it’s the utmost delight to slide between sheets dried like that.

Simple. Reachable. Doable. Small ways. They pack enough punch to change your world, or your day. Or maybe, simply and gloriously, they’ll change your moment. Small Ways is a series about small objects, small gestures, small touches. Small ways for living well.

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