Mostly Anecdotal

Clothespins are neat, and using them to attach baseball cards to the spokes of your bike was a cool thing to do when you were ten, but now when I think about Willy Mays, Duke Snider, and Mickey Mantle providing the engine for my Schwinn/motorcycle, I get a little misty-eyed.

Clothespins are designed to attach freshly washed clothes to a line to dry, but when you’re ten you find more creative uses for them, an earing for your sister, or one on your nose to block an unpleasant odor. Pins everywhere, on your nose, on your lips, on your ears, and voilà you look like the pictures of Africans in National Geographic. Today you’d look more like the teenager next door with a three ring circus on his face.

I like the smell of sheets freshly off the line. I liked helping my mom put them on the line. I liked holding the sheet so it didn’t touch the ground while she attached one end and then the other. I liked lying on the grass under the sheets imagining I was on a sailing ship and watching as the wind filled the sails, and dreaming of voyages to distant lands.

In those days, we separated our trash into wet and dry and burned the dry so you had to be careful not to dry your sheets on burning day. That is unless you liked sleeping next to a campfire. Maybe drying our clothes on a line is something we should return to, for there is nothing more annoying than a buzzing dryer that no one will turn off. And if you forget to bring in the wash the worst that will happen is that you’ll have to wait a bit longer for it to dry.

Do I regret the loss of the baseball cards, a little, but I suspect I’d regret the loss of the memories even more. For what is my life but the memory of burying my face in a sheet freshly off the line, or hearing the roar of my Schwinn/motorcycle.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Family, Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.