You can't do that here
"Here" is the Glen Oaks Ridge Condominium Community where I live.
"What we can't do" is hang out the laundry.
It's against the rules. God forbid that our neighbours should see our knickers!
And "more's the pity" is the truth. There is something beautiful to be seen in a line full of laundry.
In Italy they hang their laundry on their balcony rails. I swoon whenever I see it. But a trip to Italy is not on my horizon, so I content myself by looking at an 18" x 14" framed photo' which hangs on my dining room wall.
I bought it at an art show in St. Armand's Circle, Sarasota. It shows some lovely tenement buildings in one of the Cinque Terre. There it is - lovely laundry against fading and peeling stucco.
Lest you should think that my love of drying laundry is an odd thing - well the poet Richard Wilbur loves it too, and sees laundry and more than laundry.
Here is his "Love calls us to the things of the World" , which I use with his permission.
Love Calls Us to the Things of the World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.’
