Life in the Clothes Dryer
Sometimes life can be like a clothes dryer. You can feel hot, tumbled around, and dizzy from the fast-paced demands of life. Round and round we go, ending up in the same place we began, feeling we made no progress in our lives. Unfortunately, many of us willingly step into such chaos, and with what results? You are left parched, without the refreshing moistures of life, twisted into a tight ball. There is no “fluff” setting in such a lifestyle – only high heat.
Each time you take a tumble in the dryer, a little bit of lint is left in the trap – the little bits of you that eventually leave your life thinner, and you wondering where it went. These are the wasted moments that can’t be refound, the unnoticed skimming of time off your days that eventually pile up into a wad of loss. Don’t you sometimes wish you could gather up all those balls of lint and weave them back in to a whole fabric of yourself?
And we shrink, too, each time we go through the hot dryer. We draw up and the sleeves are too short, the body too tight. We have a hard time making life fit anymore. We cover up the condition of our clothes with artificial perfumes and softeners, a consolation for their wear and tear.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We could take the more leisurely approach to drying our clothes by hanging them on an clothesline. The morning sun is warm on your back as you pin each item on the line, the dampness of the sheet caressing your face. The breeze dances the clothes on the line, gently exchanging their dewiness for that fresh smell of the outdoors that only clothes dried on a clothesline can have. There is no shrinkage, no thinning. A little fading perhaps of the darker items, but also a brightening of the lighter – isn’t that how life should be?
Is it as fast and convenient? Probably not. And, some fabrics come out a little stiff. But you have had the sublime pleasure of standing in the quiet sunshine, of seeing each item as its own shape, rather than part of a tumbled mass in a hot, crazily circling drum. You have heard the morning chorus of birds in the trees, inhaled the aroma of cut grass in the air – and eventually, you will have dry clothes, too.
Best of all, on some drearier day when the sky is rainy, you will have the delight of smelling that summer day as you pull a clean shirt over your head, reminded of the fullness of living. Now, isn’t that better than dealing with the heat-breathing dragon in the basement?
Liz Rhodebeck, a freelance writer, likes to take note of the everyday moments of life in her poetry and essays. See her website at www.waterwriter.com.
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