The windy day

Since I can remember, I have hung wash out to dry. Always grateful for a breeze to speed the process, I don't believe I've ever had one like today's.

We are parked next to a friend's home on Prince Edward Island. Malpeque Bay, at the foot of a grassy hill, is in a chop, white streaks appearing and disappearing as the wind froths the water. Its usual sapphire surface is black today where the clouds throw their shadows.

The low trees between the house and the marsh bordering the island beach churn with each gust. A harrier, terrorizing the mousy denizens of the marsh, rocks from side to side as the wind challenges even that master of the air.

When I loaded the washer with a week's worth of sheets and towels I knew I'd have a good air to dry them, but never dreamed I'd be wrestling with a gale. Back home in Georgia, a wind like this brings torrents and lightning, not sunshine, blue skies, and billowing cumulonimbus.

(I use the term "gale" advisedly. My sailor-husband says gale-force winds are characterized by flags flying straight out. One might say we have gale-force gusts today, but sustained winds of probably no more than 30 to 40 knots, says he. Huh. He wasn't 'rassling wet breeches.)

The day looked so favorable, I gathered from the camper everything that needed a good rub-a-dub-dub. By the time I bring out the second load, the sheets hung first have turned into rope streaming horizontally from the clotheslines. Ordinary boxer shorts are whips that slash across my face when I walk injudiciously among them.

Dave's jeans appear to contain their owner plus twice the 20 pounds he's so proud he lost since the first of the year. Secured to a line by three pairs of clothespins, they dance and kick and leap to the tune of a fiddler I can neither hear nor see.

A pretty little denim vest loses two silver buttons to the wind. A careful search of the lawn turns up one; the second is gone.

I no sooner turn my back on a couple of towels when they flee across the grass. Only a strategically planted wall of pine trees prevents their reaching the dirt road and freedom. Little do they know the road goes no farther once it passes the cottage. Pinned again this time folded nearly a third over the line they settle contentedly to the rhythm of the wind and snap like flowered terry-cloth flags.

At home, I wouldn't dream of hanging clothes out so higgledy-piggledy to dry. My mom brooked no carelessly-hung laundry. Said you could tell a lot about a housewife by how she hung her wash.

Sheets together, towels together, shirts by the hem, underwear in order his, mine and hung by the waistband, socks by the toes. Fifty years later, if I see shirts pinned to a line by the shoulders (thereby pinched into little points), or socks hung by the cuff (thereby stretched out unattractively), I "tsk-tsk" mentally and conclude that a bachelor has hung his own wash.

But today, in these gusts, I have had to rehang fugitive Fruit-of-the-Looms and unmanageable unmentionables so many times, I'm now simply throwing them across the line and pinning whatever surface I can grasp. Socks? Never mind; those I'll drape on the string in the camper's shower stall.

Lines twang around me, sheets strain to escape, pins lurch out of my grasp. I'm suddenly reminded of a calamitous sailing trip that ended, for me, with my worst-ever case of seasickness.

Laundry affixed to line for the moment at least, I retreat to the camper for a soothing cup of tea. I hang socks in the shower while the kettle heats; outside, the wind buffets the tall sides of the vehicle. I sit and sip, watching the clouds form and re-form into monsters, and wonder if a wind strong enough to break our host's flagpole it did, earlier in the summer could blow over a small motor home.

It's trying, heaven knows. A vent clatters, the skin rumbles, but the car itself rocks pleasantly, like a sailboat on an easy reach. From the stillness inside, I watch tiny yellow butterflies working in a neighbor's field of clover. Until they move, they are indistinguishable from the hawkweed, dandelion's cousin, growing amidst the clover. How can they hold on in this tempest?

Last evening at twilight, we watched a trio of foxes move cautiously from the edge of the brush, daring each other to approach the cottage where they know scraps have been thrown out to tempt them. The air was so still then that we had to stay behind the glass or become a meal to marauding mosquitoes.

Not a breath stirred as we watched. One fox sat like a puppy, his lush tail stretched alongside; another scratched his ear without enthusiasm.

They'd move closer, then retreat as though at play, dashing a few steps, but still far from the safety of the undergrowth.

We watched until it was too dark to see. This morning, the crusts were gone.

The hawk is still at work over the beach. No gulls in this frenzy, nor crows. Only a couple of jays brave the bluster at the top of the lawn.

I guess I'll rinse my cup and go corral our wayward underwear.

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