The day is stunningly lovely. It is sunny. The leaves glint in the light. The birds are singing. It is 74°. It won’t get much warmer. The heat starts tomorrow when we may even finally get some rain.

My mother had a wringer washing machine. She didn’t have a dryer. The backyard had clothes lines for both sides of the duplex. My mother had three long lines. A cloth holder hung on one line. It held the wooden clothespins. I remember how she used to hang the clothes. To save on clothespins, shirts were connected at the bottoms while sheets and towels were connected at the tops. Pants were hung by their legs. Some of our neighbors had metal pant forms which hung the pants folded. I guess it made ironing easier. In the winter the clothes froze, sometimes straight out as if they were being blown by the wind. My mother couldn’t fold those clothes. She left them in the cellar until the ice melted. She’d hurry outside to take down the clothes if it started to rain then she would hang them in the cellar to finish drying. I remember the towels were always a bit rough, but the sheets smelled of outside, of fresh air and the wind.

I have a huge number of paper grocery bags. The grocery store double bags. I use the bags to hold my recyclables like dog food cans, newspapers and magazines. I like the ones with the paper strap holders. When I was a kid, we used them as book covers for our school loaned books. First you cut the bag apart then you lay the book on it to measure. You had to make sure you had enough paper to make the folds, the parts that slide onto the book ends. Sometimes we’d tape the folds at top. The finished covers had folds in the front. I didn’t know anyone who ever bought a book cover.

I have to vacuum today. The dust balls are beginning to come alive or maybe it is just my imagination because they move. They sort of skip up and down the hall when the wind blows. My outside uke concerts begin today on the Hyannis village green. I also have a concert on Saturday from 7 to 9. I have nothing in between, no practice or lesson this week. It will be a quiet week.

This entry was posted on June 29, 2026 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.