Story, Jo's Notes, Clotheslines

 

I love my clothes dryer.

I don't want to wash clothes by hand, either, so I love my washing machine too.

My electric company caused this machine love by suggesting I dry my clothes on an outside line to save electricity and money.

Really? Let's find electricity that is cheaper and safer for the environment.

I remember, though, the fragrance of fresh sheets dried outside. One summer, between school semesters, Neil and I drove back from Oklahoma to work for our old bosses in McMinnville, OR. There, we rented a little house with an outside clothesline. I washed our clothes that summer in a wringer washing machine and hung them on a line. A year later, I opened a box where I had stored a few bed sheets. They still held the fragrance of outside fresh air.

After that clothesline suggestion, I wondered what I would be willing to return to. Having clothing freeze on the line and taken into the house where they would stand on their own like paper dolls? Please no. (Eventually, those paper doll clothes would puddle on the floor.)

How about running outside to save the dried clothing from a sudden rainstorm?

Nada.

 I see there are advantages of thinking in decades and wondering if I have something to contribute to our present times. And what could we do to slow down climate change or reverse it?

(Is all the present unrest distracting us from thinking about our home—our planet—that it is heating up, (I see the hump-backed whales are suffering from water that is too warm.)

What could we do to slow the process to give us time to perhaps halt it. This distraction threatens our sanity, security, and way of living. Is it taking away our love, ability to cooperate, negotiate, have rational thought, and treat people kindly, especially those who think differently from us?)

Once, we burned our garbage in a large steel drum. My family lived on a farm for a while, and it was during a time when most everything we burned was paper. We didn't even carry home packages in plastic or cardboard, and there were no straws or plastic cups by the gross. If we bought a Sub sandwich at our local Hand Out—(They were great, by the way) it came wrapped in paper.

Our water came from a well, so there is no need to recycle plastic water bottles. 

Occasionally, we threw cans into the incinerator. The fire burnt off the labels and sterilized them, and we swept up the rusted cans after the fire was out and, about once a year, carried them to the dump. Our plastic was built into radios and TV’s—that is things we actually used for years.  

Our school or picnic sandwiches were wrapped in waxed paper—that worked fine.

Our meat, purchased from the butcher, was wrapped in brown waxed paper and tied up with twine. That worked, too. And I remember we rented a freezer in town, and the meat was wrapped in waxed paper. Do they have freezers like swimming pool lockers now?

I could go back to that.

I guess, instead of placing our produce in a plastic bag, we carried it home and put it in the "Freshener." (My husband calls it "the Rotter.”) But then, we had abundant fruit and fresh produce on a farm. Fruit was sold or canned. (Please, no canning. Oh, but I long for my mother's pickled crabapples. When mom had peaches canned at a cannery, that saved her and my hands. I hated washing the jars.).

Eggs were kept in" water glass." (A sodium silicate/water solution.). Preserved eggs will keep up to 18 months. The trouble with that egg preservation is the eggs need to be clean and unwashed. (Eggs have a natural cuticle or "bloom" that seals the shell from bacterial invasion. However, it is easily washed off. The result is that eggs don’t keep as long.)

See, I do like modern conveniences. However, I would be willing to go back to some of these ways. (Yet today, hypocrite that I am, I used plastic bags to bring home produce. But if plastic was not available, and paper bags were I would happily use them.

Our Christmas packages were beautifully wrapped using licked stickers (No cellophane tape until later.)  Mom tied our gifts up gloriously in pretty ribbon. Toys were hidden until Christmas Eve, then placed under the tree.  That worked. It was fun.

I could go back to that.

I could go back to a horse and carriage if my family lived close by, but they live about 29 miles away, which would take a day on horseback or carriage. It takes about 33 minutes by car.

Many families live across the country from each other, so a visit requires flying or a long trip by vehicle.  

Once, I rode my horse Boots from our farm to our best friend's house across the town of The Dalles for the adventure. It was ten or fifteen miles, and I spent the night with her, so it was a two-day trip. I had taken a less-traveled route across town and encountered little traffic. (I used a saddle, that McClellan saddle my dad thought was so great, but it was more pain than pleasure, but it made me look somewhat presentable.) My second mother-type friend took the picture in front of her house with her little dog and me on Boots. She sent it to me years later. It is the only picture I can find of Boots and me.

 

 

The other day, I saw an entire trainload of lumber wrapped in plastic. Is that necessary? As a kid, we regularly saw great flotillas of logs chained in their own corral of logs floating or tug-boated down the Columbia River. Logs are kept wet until they are cut into timber. Keeping them wet reduces bugs, keeps the logs from "checking" (splitting), reduces fungi, and makes them easier to cut. I suppose the plastic wrap comes after they have been kiln-dried. I wonder about the value of that. That seems extravagant while telling us to reduce our use of plastic.

Hay is sometimes wrapped up in plastic. That hay needs to be kept dry, or it will turn to silage. (Never serve those big bales to your horse; they sometimes spoil in the center. Bovines can handle it; horses can't.)

Great pallets of merchandise are wrapped in plastic, and the packaging of foods has become extreme for the ease of preserving, storing, and shelving them.

We tried eliminating plastic bags for carry-outs from the grocery store. Then we debated which harmed the environment less: creating plastic or cutting down trees. Do you have an answer to that?

We do recycle. We save glass. We are trying.

I saw a story about a woman who tried to shop plastic-free for a week. It was a challenge, and she said her meals were boring. Yogurt?—in plastic. Cheese?—in plastic. Meat—in plastic. Even the pasta box had a little plastic window. And why oh why oh do Kleenex boxes have a plastic pull-through space in their cardboard box? Our recycle pickup warns against mixing plastic with paper.

This could give city planners a challenge as many people live in apartments. Some apartment complexes have incorporated parks and playgrounds into their plan, some even with gardening spaces, so we don't all have to live on a farm.

Time for us to give our creativity a workout.

Wouldn't it be fun to do designing for housing units? Consider the possibilities.

I read once that in France (The Land of Milk), they had pastures and milk cows next to villages, and their cows were healthy, lived much longer, and produce milk for more years than American cows.

Let’s eliminate the crowding of cattle into stinking, filthy, disease infested feed lots. Animals do not like to stand in their own dung. If given a chance they will choose a restroom area.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I was so impressed with my two horses who used one side of their 24 x 12 foot run -in barn, that is three sided, and the size of two stalls. They had their hay on one side and used the other side for a bathroom. I cleaned it every morning.

Okay Dokey, Chapter 44 from Your Story Matters

 

 44

 What? Hawaii Again?

 Or, “Life Exists Beyond the Horizon.

 Although the Hawaiian experience is in my book The Frog's Song, it only includes some of the incidents; thus, I keep returning and trying to make sense of it all. 

 Before moving to Hawaii, both DD and I felt it was something we had to do. That day in the horse paddock, when I asked the Great Spirit where I would be happy, the first thought that came to me was, "Look up Hawaii on the Internet."

We had already been looking around for other places, but none seemed right. When I found our Hawaiian house on the first search, I felt a hit of “this is it.”

I called down to Nina in her apartment. "There's 10 acres and a cute house for sale in Hawaii for a quarter what we are paying here."

 "Let's do it," she said.

 And we did.

 I chose the Big Island because it was large enough to suit my wandering needs. Once there, though, I heard that the Big Island draws in people who need cleansing. 

 Uncanny. 

 And, they say, it spits them out once the cleansing is complete.

 Maybe the cleansing was complete, but it didn’t settle in until a while after we moved to California.

 Before moving, back in Oregon, we were over our heads and needed cleansing. DD said later that we would never have sold the horses. (We didn't sell them; we gave them away.) Our first intention was to ship the horses, thus the 10 acres, but we decided against it. Still, we ended up with a piece of land and orchards.

One of my favorite things about living in Hawaii was becoming one with the weather and the sun. Hawaii has a 12-hour day and a 12-hour night. We had limited solar power and would, on occasion, overuse it. Suddenly, it would go off, and we would be in the dark. Thus, I guarded our electricity like a Hottentot guards his tot. 

 We needed electricity for the computers. A computer was necessary for Neil's design job. DD needed hers for an internet business, and I wanted mine for writing. So, to ensure I had electricity for my computer and thus save it for others, I often ran an electrical cord out the bedroom window to the carport and gave the Prius the job of supplying juice for my computer.

We didn't watch TV, as DD had sworn off it before we moved, and we didn't miss it. But we watched movies, and we needed electricity for that.

I loved the mornings at my desk in front of the window, where I could watch the morning's first light sneak over the trees and paint a glow on the field of green grass that grew between the main house and the Tiki Room. The green became enlightened, as though the Sun Goddess was slowly turning up her rheostat.

On one airplane trip, Little Boy Darling became so excited about the sunrise that we heard someone say, "I've never seen anyone so excited about a sunrise," and wanted a high five. Soon, everyone around us wanted a high five. And I thought we needed to get that child off the island and into the world.

At the Hawaiian City of Refuge, a native Hawaiian told the story that further solidified my intention to leave the Island. The storyteller said that when he was a boy, an elder would sit the children down and ask them, "What lies beyond the horizon?" They hemmed and hawed. Some said, "The ocean," And another, "The sky." They thought the island was their entire world. 

 "No, said the elder, "Life exists beyond the horizon."

 That is one of the reasons we left.

 For the writer, the creative, the hell-bent on pursuing their dream person, there comes a "Gun and badge moment," as Steven Pressfield writes in his "Wednesday's Writings."

 In the film, it is called the "All is lost moment." It is when the protagonist is stripped of their credentials; they must turn in their gun and badge. To further punish them, they are threatened with imprisonment, disbarment, slavery, or told they have no talent and suck at what they do.

 Do they stop?

 Did Jodie Foster stop in the movie Silence of the Lambs? Did Tom Cruise in Top Gun? 

Neither did we when we were hell-bent on moving to Hawaii., and hell-bent on moving back. And neither am I on my road to writing 50,000 words for this memoir.

I sold the horse panels in Hawaii, and DD sold the cast iron-footed bathtub she took to put in her bathroom. That airplane engine?

 We still have it.