The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [116]
At St. John’s, we had been housed in a block of small, elegant, but very livable apartments designed by Marcel Breuer, and clotheslines were not permitted. The great architect found them “tacky,” we were told, and visually distracting. It is good to be home, where I can hang clothes and air bedding on the line, and be as tacky as I like. I come by my attachment to laundry honestly. One of my first visual memories is of my mother pulling clothes from the sky; she had a line on a pulley that ran from a window in our row house near the Naval gunnery in Washington, D.C. These days, my mother lives in a neighborhood in Honolulu where her backyard clothesline is something of a scandal. But she’s a Plainswoman at heart, and a clothesline is simple necessity.
Living in the house where she grew up, I’ve become pleasantly haunted by laundry. I’m grateful that I no longer have to pull clothes through a wringer, as my grandmother did for years. Her bottles of blueing gather dust in the basement; I haven’t used them, but can’t throw them out. But, like her, I wouldn’t dream of using the electric dryer unless I have to. In March or April I begin to long for the day when I can hang clothes on the line again. Our winters are so long and severe in western South Dakota that we bank on the slightest summer joys; the scent of clothes dried out of doors, the sweet smell of sun on them.
I must be vigilant; sudden thunderstorms march across the prairie in late afternoon, making a mockery of clothes hung out to dry. Our winds can be so strong that clothes go flying. And during times of drought, there is sometimes so much dust in the air that line drying is impractical. Old-timers who recall the “Dirty Thirties” speak of seeing grasshoppers eat clothes right off the line, a sight I never hope to see, although I’ve thought about it in the springs and summers when we’ve waited months for rain.
My youngest sister once had a dream about a tornado that seemed an astute portrait of our parents: as the storm approached, Dad wandered off to get a better look at the twister and Mom ran to get the clothes off the line. I recall running into my clergy friend one evening at a church supper. She’d been frantically busy with meetings all day and the next night would be conducting a wedding rehearsal. News of a death in the congregation meant that she now also had a funeral to prepare for, and this led us to talk of epitaphs. “I know what I want on my tombstone,” she said. “At last, her laundry’s done.”
DREAMING
OF TREES
I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some
special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay
more attention to these preferences and seek what is best to do
in order to make themselves worthy . . . they might have
dreams which would purify their lives . . .
—Brave Buffalo,
Sioux, BY THE POWER OF THEIR DREAMS
Jim Burden, the narrator of Willa Cather’s My Antonia, says of the Nebraska prairie to which he has moved from Virginia that “trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.” He adds, “It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”
Burden is speaking of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, but his words ring true for a prairie dweller one hundred years later. The small town where I live, like most towns in the western Dakotas, was plunked down on a treeless plain. Settlement followed the path of railroad lines, not rivers, and nearly all of the trees, like all the buildings, had to be planted. Photographs