The Clothesline

By TAD BARTIMUS

I hung wash out to dry this morning. As I stood there beside the clothesline, methodically lifting sheets out of the wicker basket and wrestling them over the too-high-for-short-people cord, I had a flashback.

There I was, very small, staring up at the dark-haired woman with the wooden clothespins in her mouth who was smiling down at me. We were in an orchard and pink and white blossoms were falling on our heads. The sky of memory was so blue it hurt my eyes, so I kept burying my face in the white sheets drooping from the clothesline.

Having avoided Mother's Day for half a decade, I realized I was ready at last to spend the day in my memories.

Wet sheets hung in the sun smell of new beginnings. All of this came to me as I stood, halfway around the world from where my mind was, deep in the past. This morning I wanted my mother. I wanted her here, next to me, putting her arms around me and stroking my hair. I have not been this close to her since she died. It felt good, standing in that breezeway with a load of soggy laundry in my hands, to cry.

Women's work is primordial. Since Eve, we have chopped food with knives on boards, scrubbed cloth, cooked over fire. The advent of microwaves and self-cleaning ovens has made our tasks easier -- they need to be, since we now do the work of our fathers as well as our mothers. But for all of our progress, housekeeping chores remain essentially the same as those performed by our sisters in the cave. We pass them down, mother to daughter, just as we hand down quilts and deviled egg plates and embroidered handkerchiefs carried on our wedding day.

This is not true of American men in the '90s. Their family's survival no longer depends on stalking and killing food. With few exceptions, they don't build their shelter with their hands. Except for the odd Montana fishing guide or Texas rancher, manly work does not involve hunting, tracking or herding. Most likely it revolves around phones, paperwork and shuttle flights. Men are cheated out of hands-on daily linkage to their masculine past. Only in combat do they make that connection to their prehistoric selves. Perhaps that is why we have a war every generation.

Happiness always catches me off guard. I was happy this morning, when I pulled my clean laundry out of my washing machine. Having avoided Mother's Day for half a decade, I realized I was ready at last to spend the day in my memories. In my woman's task of hanging clothes on a line I re-embraced my mother as I wanted to remember her, bypassing those last terrible years of suffering.

I am an extension of her, doing as she did, as women before us did, cleaning clothes and offering them up to become pure again. Every time I do this the healthy, beautiful and loving mother of my childhood stands beside me, laughing in the morning sun, brushing apple blossoms from her hair. I am her; she is me.

I wrap my arms around wet sheets and hug myself.

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