O Shenandoah! Country Reckoning/October

Food For Thought By Julie B. Gochenour

My clothes dryer and washing machine sit in the basement, quick, easy, convenient, and I use them all the time. Which means I seldom hang anything on the length of clothesline strung along the hillside at the edge of the woods. It's simply too much trouble to pile the wet clothes in a basket, carry them up the basement steps, out the back door and across the yard. Especially when the alternative is to stand in one place and scoop the clothes from one round hole to another. No need to fumble with clothespins or hanging everything just so. Just push a button and go. But I'm learning what I had somehow forgotten, that I also pay a price for speed and convenience. Faced with the aftermath of a recent flash flood, I used the clothesline to help handle mounds of sopping winter clothes and bed linens that needed to be laundered. Instead of doing laundry in a dark, drab basement, I found myself outdoors at odd times of day, seeing hundreds of things I normally miss... the dappled light on midmorning green leaves, a darting flash of hummingbird wings, the steady course of daylilies tracking toward the sun. It's no trouble to do laundry in the basement, but what I realize now is that my choices have consequences -- yes, cost -- a cost I don't always stop to count. Along the way I've missed the time it takes to hang laundry on the line, to shake each piece out and notice its colors and textures, to remember where I bought it, for whom, and why. There were also things I hadn't noticed in ages -- the smell of clean, fresh, damp sheets, the taste of a new wooden clothespin held between the teeth, the intermittent lift and flow of a southerly breeze, the crisp, rough texture of cotton dried by air and sun. It was a valuable lesson. Unexpectedly, I made a different choice and my days suddenly changed for the better. I think I need to remember that.