The True Meaning of Clotheslines

I once worked on a photo essay with a photographer, whose specialty was light. His gift was light, knowing where to find it, how to cast it to create shadows. The photo essay focused on clotheslines and we drove around for hours in the old Cabbage Town, before it became gentrified. We found clotheslines at small cinder block ministries with descendants of the original mill workers, and clotheslines in the mountains, with sheets and work clothes billowing in the wind, a young mother with cowboy boots balancing a wicker clothes basket on one hip, a long King cigarette between her lips, her fingers working the clothes pins as she talked. She was beautiful.

That was 15 years ago, but what made me think of it is the clothesline that is beginning to make a spider's web through the forest that is my backyard. The September light, the clarity, the bright cool yellow making shadows on the white and orange and pink fabrics that are strung above the green ivy, protected from the sun by dogwoods and a wall of giant bamboo.

So what’s the point? The simplest thing in the world is actually quite beautiful, even an ordinary clothesline. Whatever Stephen Hawking has to say about God, I think that the smallest bit of life is something of a miracle. A clothesline is such a minor detail, yet it makes us mindful of earth and wind. It says, “This is how basic human needs are—nothing is that complicated.”

It’s not. Communion, for instance. This morning I rushed up to the altar at the last minute but Patricia had saved me a piece of bread fit for a mouse. (I think she counts each one of us like a flock.) There was Claudia and Gilda and the silver chalice. It made me smile. The candles, the choir, quite simple, ancient even, yet unbelievably beautiful.

Simple as the act of putting away dishes, love comes. Simple as the subtle wind that is our breath, God comes.