Herculean Tasks

     I hang my laundry.  I started when I was broke in college and had only one pair of jeans, and I haven’t stopped since. Once, I hung my laundry at a friend’s in La Jolla until the neighbor told me they didn’t do that there, too unseemly. I hung my daughters’ cloth diapers daily in the backyard of my first house, and I hung my laundry through rainy El Nino. I hang laundry to save money, to save the environment, to save my sanity, and to save the smell of the breeze.   

     I am stubborn about it.  I am closer to the sky out there. I am closer to women all over the world out there.  I can tell how long any piece of clothing will take to dry in any weather. In Ireland, women hang laundry in the misty morning, and take it down dry that late afternoon.  They know their sky.  I remember on September 1, 2001, women were called upon to dance out in the full moon’s light all over the world.  I did, all alone. My backyard was brightly gray-blue, the crickets were singing their tunes, and I swayed to and fro, under and around.  As I pin each shirt, each sock, each sheet to the line, I feel like that dancing night, like there are other spirits feeling the same sun at my back and breeze at my side.  

     I don’t know anyone personally who hangs their laundry.  Too busy. Throw it in the dryer with the perfumed anti-cling disposable cloth. Take it out hot and cringing. 

    Hanging laundry gives me a reprieve from the bustle of my day.  I can think in slow motion as I hang each piece.  I work out problems, console myself, plan my hour, and leave myself behind.

     Most days when I hang laundry I spy on my bird feeders or give rubdowns to my dogs.  Last week I almost stepped on a few busy ants.  There is a crack on our patio in which a traffic jam of red harvester ants emerges and submerges.  They lay a path with a stop, start cadence. I stay out of their workweek, but on this particular day, a few were struggling along my clothesline territory.  They were hauling a fallen flower petal. They were having such a hard time handling this awkward load. I wanted to pick it up as a cargo plane, but I could not figure out if they were going to or from the nest. I also couldn’t figure out why.  It was a petal, not a seed. Was it meant for a soft bed, or had they already extracted the nectar and this was refuse?  They reached about 6 inches in 15 minutes, totally parallel to the far off nest. I could only marvel at these mini-He-women.

     I am learning about and teaching odes to my students this semester.  Robert Burns wrote an ode to a louse crawling on a lady’s bonnet in church, Walt Whitman wrote an ode to Lincoln after he died, and Pablo Neruda wrote a whole book of Odes to Common Things.  I am looking forward to reading all the odes the students will laboriously come up with, all the things they will choose to praise. There will be cats, dogs, basketball, ipods, and even parents.  I will choose my clothesline, of course.

     I just learned of the newest appointed US Poet Laureate.  Here is one of his poems:

What Work Is      by Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line 

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. 

You know what work is--if you're 

old enough to read this you know what 

work is, although you may not do it. 

Forget you. This is about waiting, 

shifting from one foot to another. 

Feeling the light rain falling like mist 

into your hair, blurring your vision 

until you think you see your own brother 

ahead of you, maybe ten places. 

You rub your glasses with your fingers, 

and of course it's someone else's brother, 

narrower across the shoulders than 

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin 

that does not hide the stubbornness, 

the sad refusal to give in to 

rain, to the hours wasted waiting, 

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead 

a man is waiting who will say, "No, 

we're not hiring today," for any 

reason he wants. You love your brother, 

now suddenly you can hardly stand 

the love flooding you for your brother, 

who's not beside you or behind or 

ahead because he's home trying to 

sleep off a miserable night shift 

at Cadillac so he can get up 

before noon to study his German. 

Works eight hours a night so he can sing 

Wagner, the opera you hate most, 

the worst music ever invented. 

How long has it been since you told him 

you loved him, held his wide shoulders, 

opened your eyes wide and said those words, 

and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never 

done something so simple, so obvious, 

not because you're too young or too dumb, 

not because you're jealous or even mean 

or incapable of crying in 

the presence of another man, no, 

just because you don't know what work is.

   How appropriate for this Labor Day, a day we spend not going to our workplace.  We celebrate not working, rather than working. How odd. What about the labor of love, a mother’s birthing labor, a wife’s homecooked meal, and a man’s finding his calling? There is labor involved in staying friends, staying married, and staying connected. Labor makes the rewards and the lazy days sweet.  This poem reminds me of the gifts of work.

      Hercules had to do some ridiculous tasks.  The list of them seemed endless.   My perpetual hanging of laundry may seem ridiculous to some, but to me it is worth it!                                                                     ~Labor Day, Sept. 5, 2011

Bird Brain

    One of my first thoughts of the economic crisis 3 years ago, after a little freak-out over our current personal, astronomical debt, was of birds.  Would folks still be able to feed wild birds at their feeders? Would I be able to afford wild bird seed?  I currently supply 2 feeders, one of  songbird seed and one of tiny thistle seed. Whenever I fill up the feeders, I obnoxiously sing, "Feed the birds, tuppence a bag."  Now I try not to think, "Feed the birds, $11 a bag." And that is only the songbird bag.  Thistle seed is $18 for a smallish bag!
  I am enamored with lesser goldfinches whose little bills tweeze out these thistle seeds. There is no way I cannot fill up their feeder. They empty their tube of seeds in 2 days while my other songbird feeder is devoured in just 6 hours.  I watch mourning doves, house finches, towhees, house sparrows, scrub jays and a returning spring couple, black-headed grosbeaks. I am thrilled by all these visitors. I eagerly count them, and in the winter I tally them for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. 
  This doesn't seem like a wide winged variety but they attract countless feathered friends.  This spring we had 2 nests of wrens, a nest of house finches and a nest of ravens.  We also had prized western bluebirds, a rash of cedar waxwings, and an opportunistic Cooper's hawk. Mockingbirds sing stolen songs in the middle of a summer night, and a black phoebe swoops daily over our pool. Bands of bushtits flit in bouncing clumps through our yard, and 2 ladder-backed woodpeckers trill on the fly from tree to tree. Each evening mysterious owls shriek and hoot. 
  Each dawn our yardmates serenade us. My gratitude for their presence and their melodies is seed. Please alight and sing for us!  Please lay your perfect blue eggs here! Please flourish! 
  $11 or $18 a bag? Pshaw! What a bargain! What a necessity! 

               There's a comfortable squirrel splayed out in the heat above the feeder.