We had a clothes dryer when I was growing up, but it didn't get used a lot. My mother was a firm believer in the clothes line, and though I can't say I've ever given this much thought till now, today's featured poem has brought back vivid "scent memories" of those wind-stiff sheets and clothes from my childhood and made me wax nostalgic! I've been having fond recollections of bringing in laundry off the line (not hanging it: wet laundry is gross and heavy!) and its wonderful, clean, fresh smell. Line-dried towels are stiff and scratchy, those I don't miss, and line-dried clothes spell i-r-o-n-i-n-g--which I do NOT do. But, yeah, the sheets? I miss those. Too bad my back yard is aswirl with the pollen of a zillion blooms; I'd like to go hang up a few bed linens!
2010 Poetry Parade: Day 13
Catching April
by
Heather Moore Niver
I hang out linens
on a bright raw morning.
The spring sky sneers,
reluctant to warm up
to me or the season,
so I retreat with moist numb thumbs.
All day I hear the sharp snap of sheets
whipping in the cold gusts
that try to rip them from the line.
Dark stick silhouettes
claw along tangled cotton,
but orange cases pillow
with the season’s spite and glow
in a row of summer moons.
Late in the afternoon I bring them inside,
dry and sun-warm,
and fold up the sweet clear air
caught within their threads.
© 2009 by Heather Moore Niver
Used here with the author's permission
