Folding the Laundry

Memories! Where would we be without them?

Oh, how they help us to keep our bearings ... pointing out where we've been ... and sometimes helping us to remain pointed in the direction we should go.

They don't have to be of the greatest moments of our lives. They may even be of moments that could have been easily forgotten.

What, after all, is memorable about folding the laundry? Something obviously was ... and still is ... for me.

I still remember how the sun played across the items hanging from that sagging line ... how the movements of those items reminded me of dancing ... line dancing, I suppose ... long before I knew what line dancing was.

And now, before I wander off in some other direction, the poem:

FOLDING THE LAUNDRY

Still warm as though

just sloughed off

the bodies of wearers,

it yields softly

to my hands tonight,

recalling those times

Grandma and I pulled

sweet-smelling armloads

of hand-washed laundry

from a sagging line

in the back yard.

I feel the fatigue

again, bare feet

picking their way

among the honeybees,

finding little comfort

as she directed me

to look up, see

the clouds, which,

she insisted,

were somebody else's

laundry left out,

still flapping,

and now, an easing

of my tired back

as that memory

gently enfolds me.

© 1998

(originally published in Riverrun)

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Today's word: flapping