Memories on a clothesline

I love watching clothes dry. It’s mesmerising to see them dance about in the wind. Mug in hand or no mug in hand, I keep track of all that movement while pondering on something or nothing. Usually nothing, in fairness.

I’m in the fortunate position of having a back garden and a clothesline and I regularly find myself glancing out at my jeans and towels and assorted bits and pieces swooping up and down or gently swaying in the breeze, to a backdrop of blue skies and white clouds.

It’s not quite a form of meditation, this looking at the clothesline, or then again maybe it is. I’m no expert here. But the sight of those clothes out there in the elements, gradually transforming from damp to dry, generates an oddly reassuring sense of wellbeing.

The washing process, itself, isn’t quite so whimsical. The noise of the washing machine, especially when it goes into that spin cycle and threatens to exit the house through the roof, is anything but warm and endearing. But, of course, compared to times past, the process is so much less labour-intensive. In truth, it’s as good as a doddle.

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My mother had a washing machine that had to be filled manually with a hose attached to the kitchen sink. It was a fantastic contraption that was open at the top so you could look straight in at the clothes sloshing about.

And once the washing part was over, the clothes had to be taken out and physically pushed through two rollers to squeeze out all that water, as the spinning part of the cycle had yet to be invented.

Mam had that washing machine for well over 20 years until we convinced her to upgrade. And it was still in working order as she watched it being taken out of the house, filled with regret that she’d been talked into replacing it.

The whole palaver is one I associate with our American relations. These were my mother’s sister and brother-in-law who came over for two or three weeks at a time every few years.

My granny didn’t have a washing-machine so they decamped to us to get the job done. Memory can be tricky and maybe they only did this the once but I can clearly remember arriving in from school to find them sitting at our kitchen table drinking tea, with the washing machine churning away in the background and the kitchen filled with chat and dirty laundry.

During the years they didn’t make it back, my relations would sometimes send over a box of hand-me-downs, whose contents were targeted at an assorted array of us nieces and nephews. T-shirts, tops, trousers, the odd jacket. That sort of thing. All clean, in good order and perfectly folded and packed into that box by my aunt.

But, of course, sophisticates that we were, we groaned when that box would appear in granny’s house. It was patently clear to us that the fashion sense prevalent on our side of the Atlantic was far superior to the one holding court in Irish-American circles and were entirely sceptical about the items my aunt had clearly inflicted on her own offspring.

But occasionally we did strike gold.

My sisters and I were the first in Navan to wear hot-pants, pink hot-pants, as we scooted about on our bikes. Hot-pants straight from New York.

And likewise anyone with an eye for cutting-edge fashion could see that we were the first kids in the country to don baseball caps and the best kind of baseball caps, at that - the ones with N.Y.C. emblazoned in front. Looking back on this now, all those years later, it’s clear that my aunt had bought these for us as they were new, brand new, with the tags still on when, moaning and sighing with eyes no doubt raised, we fished them out of that box.

There’s a family photo of my siblings and I, on our summer holidays, somewhere in the wilds of Kerry. We’re wearing our caps and looking all cool and disinterested, pointedly staring off into the distance as if vaguely irritated by the presence of the camera but clearly delighted with ourselves, nonetheless.

It’s strange how looking at clothes dry can trigger the oddest memories. Maybe it’s an evolutionary thing, Maybe the ritual is alive with resonances of purification ceremonies from the past. Or maybe it’s just down to fresh air and the satisfaction of a job done and dusted and off the list.

But whatever it is, I sit or stand or lean against the open door and watch.