Clothesline

By now my neighbours must think I’ve completely cracked. Gone off the deep end. Getting rid of the car. Giving up the career.Leaving an amazing neighbourhood and selling a home we’ve spent years perfecting. All of that I think they could wrap their heads around, just for the sheer adventure. But the clothes line in the backyard might be the tipping point.

I’m sure they believe now that they are living next to eco-guerilla girl--former tv host, who in a single bound has rejected her car for a crazy red bike and now refuses even to use a clothes dryer. The truth, which I haven’t yet spilled, , is that my high priced, fancy shmancy Fisher and Paykel dryer stopped doing just that. Drying. It moves round and round but no matter how long it’s left on, it doesn’t dry. There’’s no heat. Friends have offered to let me use their dryers. There’s also a laundromat not so far away that will even wash and dry and fold, for a fee. But instead, because I have just a little too much pride to bag up my wet clothes and cart them around the neighbourhood, I enlist the help of my 5 year old daughter Eva. We grab some twine and string it from the play fort to the swimming pool slide, a distance that spans the length of our downtown backyard.

Together we haul the clothes out of the washer, up from the basement and take them outside. Eva didn’t know there was actually a time before dryers. She was oblivious to the real scent of the outdoors on her clothes, a smell so different from the deceptive “morning rain”, and “summer breeze” promised by the soap companies.

Clothes lines are before my time too, but I do have some vague childhood memory of being disgusted by bird poop on one of my shirts. I also just now remember that when I was in highschool in Fenelon Falls our dryer was broken. For years. And a family without a dryer is just about the shadiest thing possible in a small town. I know the sight of my mum, lugging garbage bags of wet clothes to the laundromat must have triggered a whole new round of gossip, further shaking our already tenuous position in the community.

We had after all, committed many unwritten--and to us at the time, unknown--social sins of small town living. My mum probably bore the brunt of it. My dad’s insane knowledge of music and sense of humour protected him from the usual nightmare of being a highschool french teacher. But my mum refused to wear the title of upstanding wife, mother and substitute teacher. She instead wore crazy tights (years ahead of vogue) and far out clothes from India. She started up a drama school for kids where all sorts of “weird” stuff went on. Petitioned to have streetlights installed at the corner where we lived. Got right in there to try and wake up the United Church to embrace gay people. And then there was the Peace Project she started up, holding meetings, marches and selling t-shirts she designed with a logo of a duck in the crosshairs. Get it? Sitting ducks. (Believe it or not, activism was probably the biggest small town sin of all, at least then, in the 1980’s.) And on top of all of that, there were the feasts with crazy music in the backyard. And not at 5pm either, but sometimes even as late as 7 or 8! Yes, the Haines family provided the gossips with hours of entertainment.

I don’t know how much of this is family lore, but I do remember my mum , by now giving up any attempt at fitting in, telling a nosy neighbour that she was outside sweeping at 6 in the evening to gather up leaves. For our dinner. The same woman was caught red-handed standing at the backdoor of our house, with her ear actually pressed against the door trying to listen in on our raucus family meals!

There was also a rumour that we had orgies at our house. A word I still crack up over, because the guy spreading the gossip didn’t know that orgy has a soft “g”.. He called it an or-ghee. A pronounciation error that has forever messed me up in the rare occasions when I need to use the word. Orgy? Orghee? I go back and forth like Dave Letterman’s unfortunate Uma/Oprah bit at the Oscars years ago.

You’d have to ask my mum if this stuff was malicious. I don’t remember it being so, but I was only a kid at the time. I think it was just boredom talking more than anything else. And the older I get the more I realize that all those crazy things that go on in small towns-, happen in the big cities too. We’re just so disconnected from eachother, so private and closed off in the city that the gossip rarely gets back to us.

And here I am, years later, abruptly ending my love affair with the city. Moving to a town smaller than the one I so quickly left as a teenager.

I think I’ll have an easier time of it than my mum did. Partially because the town of Mal Pais, the littleI know of it so far anyway, is made up of so many different people and cultures that one more oddball family won’t make a difference. More than anything though I think we’ll fit in just fine because we live near the top of a jungle mountain, with no one to hear our loud music, rowdy “leaf” dinners or our or-GHEES.