The Monday the Quilts Came Out

The first time I saw my new neighbor take a picture of my clothesline, she was standing on her brand new deck in a pink robe, holding her phone up with both hands like she was photographing a car wreck.

It was a Monday in late March. I had one of Roger’s work shirts in my hand and two wooden clothespins in my mouth.

I took the pins out and waved.

She lowered the phone, looked at me for a long second, and went back inside. The glass slider shut hard enough that I heard it from sixty feet away.

I stood there with the wet shirt dripping on my shoe and thought, well, Marlene, maybe she has never seen a pair of bib overalls up close before.

That was the first Monday. There were two more like it before the letter came.

The line

My name is Marlene Fisk. I am sixty-one years old, and I carried rural mail out of our little post office for twenty-eight years before I retired. Route 2, one hundred and fourteen miles of gravel and blacktop, six days a week.

I drove my own Jeep and sat in the middle of the seat so I could reach the boxes on the right side. Most of the carriers out here do it that way. You get a stiff hip and you learn every dog in the county by name.

I mention the mail because it taught me something. When a person has a problem with you, you can tell a lot by whether they come to your door or put it in an envelope.

Our village has about nine hundred people, a grain elevator, two churches, a Casey’s, and a village hall that used to be the bank. Corn and beans on every side, flat enough to watch a storm come for an hour.

Roger and I bought our house on the east edge of town in 1991. The lot is close to an acre, because the man who built the place in the fifties kept a big garden and a dozen laying hens out back.

The first thing Roger did, before we even had the curtains hung, was set my clothesline.

He borrowed a post driver from the elevator and drove two steel T-posts at each end, a little apart, and bolted a crossbar across each pair. Then he strung two lines of galvanized wire between them, fifty feet long, and pulled them tight with a fence stretcher.

He painted the crossbars white because I asked him to.

“There,” he said, standing back with his hands on his hips. “Now you’ve got a line as long as your mother’s.”

That was thirty-five years ago. I have hung wash on that line nearly every Monday since, unless it was pouring or ten below.

I have a perfectly good dryer, and I use it in January. The rest of the year I hang my wash out, because there is no smell on God’s earth like a sheet dried in an Illinois wind.