Wash Wednesday

When I was in my early 20s, I spent a summer in Whistler, BC. There was a bylaw forbidding clotheslines. Having grown up in a rural area where you knew the colours and sizes of all your neighbours' undies, this was unfathomable to me. They were forbidding people to use the wind and sun to dry their clothes, because it was offensive to tourists? Huh?

I have happily hung my clothes on a line ever since. My fondest memories include that pre-birth washing of yellow and green baby clothes and diapers, hanging them out, and carefully folding them in preparation of the birth. Then the rural equivalent of a birth announcement in the newspaper: little pink or blue garments strung across the yard. And the nursing bras and postpartum undies, of course.

This picture was taken last summer, in July. We spent the last week of June in the hospital, and I took this very commonplace picture because everything I saw, all the ordinary little things in my life~ my garden, the wading pool, the play structure, and the clothesline~took on a new sheen. I still feel happy when I look at it.