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Sunday, September 29, 2019

Revisiting Those Clothes on the Line

This is a correction. Countless times have I rhapsodized about hanging my clothes outdoors, my clothes on a line, my laundry drying in the sun, drifting with the breezes. Ain't that a pretty picture?

 

I cheerfully hang my laundry on the line all summer long, which is to say for a good three or four of the twelve months of the year. As I perform this ancient task I imagine myself joining the ranks of pioneer women, or at least farm women (small-town women) from my own rural upbringing. Such nostalgia. Such reverence for tradition.

 

And what am I overlooking? Well, reality, for one thing. We have a dryer in the basement, one of those modern conveniences that function on electricity. At the slightest hint of bad weather, those clothes of mine hit the dryer. In fact, during the eight or nine or ten non-warm months of our year, the retractable clothes line sits on a shelf in the basement, not even an option.

 

Here's what doesn't happen: I don't go out in the cold to hang my clothes, ever. I don't unpin my frozen laundry from the line and carry the items inside like two-dimensional people, stiff and cold, to spread them over the furniture until they thaw to a damp, relaxed state and then re-hang them on an overcrowded wooden rack until they are semi-dry and stink of mildew.

 

In short, I experience only the hobbyist's version of "hanging out the clothes." If I were forced to live the reality of it—clothes on the line, rain or shine, sleet or snow or 40-below—I would be singing a different tune. If I were washing clothes for a young family of three or four children, with a baby or two in diapers—and washing every day and drying clothes indoors during the months of inclement weather, you'd see my beatific smile change to scowls and worry lines.

 

By glamourizing the sweet-clothes-dried-in-the-sun aspect of this, I am ignoring and thus diminishing the reality for many women—not just women from our past but those millions who are totally dependent on the vagaries of weather to keep their families presentable.

 

I apologize wholeheartedly to all those who hang out their clothes from necessity and not from choice. I am a dilettante. All I can say in my defense is that I do love it. But it is important for me to recognize the limitations of my experience and to salute, clothespins in hand, those intrepid women who do the necessary, simply because it has to be done.

 

 

 
Copyright © 2019 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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Sunday, September 22, 2019

Mundanity

I want to tell you about

the singular world I live in

(well, all our worlds are singular—

yours, mine, his, hers)—

but I can't always do it.

There's many a memory slip twixt

what I experience—

deeply, sometimes, and joyfully—

and the nib of my pen hitting paper.

 

I am indeed reduced, at such times,

to living in the present,

for the deep and exhilarating experience

becomes, in a flash,

as irretrievable as any dream.

It's no longer available, that astounding moment.

 

But I can tell you about

the very small, mundane moments of my life.

I pretend to present them as pejorative,

petty,

less than.

But the mundane is all I can offer:

the wonderful brightness

of my mundane existence.

 

 
Copyright © 2019 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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Sunday, September 15, 2019

Ages and Endings

At the birthday party for our 85-year-old friend recently, he and I were talking about relative ages. He asked me mine and I told him. But before I said it I found myself about to say, "I'll be 83 on my next birthday." And I realized that, now that we're past the middle of the year, I automatically assign myself the upcoming age, not the number age I am right now. It's like the five-year-old who lets you know she is five and a half, so eager is she to reach that magic Number Six, when school begins and front teeth fall out and she is no longer a baby-ish five.

 

So why would I want to anticipate my own new number? No excitement awaits me when I will turn 83 at Christmas.

 

Or at least I hope no excitement awaits. Because at this age the excitement is more likely to be unpleasant than fun. I know this because I look around and see what is happening to the people I know. Even my ten-years-younger friends are experiencing that not-so-pleasant kind of excitement.

 

And I don't know whether I speak for everyone my age, but I have to say that after years (decades) of pretty much taking my body for granted, I am now excruciatingly conscious of every twinge. A sharp pain someplace, a dull ache someplace else, a twinge where there has never been a twinge—any of these becomes the harbinger of—not "the end" but the beginning of the end, the means to the end. The possible signaling of what will carry me off—though first delivering me willy-nilly to the machinations and chemicalizations of the medical fraternity.

 

More alert than I have ever been, I track the workings of every organ, every muscle, every tendon, every bone. It keeps me busy, I have to say. It's a lonely task, because who on earth would want to hear all those details? I'm not quite the "malade imaginaire", since I don't broadcast these "symptoms" or let them rule my life. Yet. But I am aware as never before.

 

This has to be a good thing, this hyper-vigilance. I say that because otherwise it looks like an obsession of the ego. So let's frame it as good, as an old person's way of staying healthy physically even as the mental stress does strange things to her reality.

 

Anyway, that's it for today. Today's report from the Land of Old. Was I not premature those ten years ago when I published Hesitating at the Gate, that report from the Land of Old? I see now that ten years ago I was not old at all. And ten years further down the line (can you do the math?) I'll look back on today's rude good health and see this present self as a model of vigour and strength.

 

 
Copyright © Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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Sunday, September 8, 2019

Translating the Self

E.B. White once said that "writing is translation and the opus is yourself." What have I been doing for the last ten years but translating myself for an audience that may or may not care. Not true! Not true! I'm translating myself for MYSELF. There you go. Now you've got it.

 

Can I stop here? Can I stop in the larger sense, stop translating myself? Or does it go on and on until the last breath? I don't journal (although Henry David Thoreau told me this morning that it was time to start). So I can see me, death-bed-bound, journal in one hand, nice easy-writing pen in the other:

 

Dear Diary (Well, Dear Journal. Sounds more grown-up). I'm coming to the end of the line. What more can I say? Thanks for the memories? (Way too flippant.) A quick "thank-you-very-much" a la Elvis? (Even more flippant.)

 

Face it. I'm not going to be foreshadowing that final write today, now, in this place. It has to wait for the appropriate moment.

 

In the meantime: kindness, kindness, kindness. Or remember that each of us is seeking love from everyone we meet. In the meantime: you gotta live, live, live until you die! Everyone has already said it all—and better. So I guess I'll just keep translating . . .

 

 

 

Copyright © 2019 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

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Sunday, September 1, 2019

Responding to a Prompt

I swore, only two or three minutes ago, that on this round of writing I would accept—nay, would embrace—at least one of the prompts. How rash I was. How important is one's swearing? If I don't use one of these, will I be perjuring myself? Will anyone notice? Of course, no one would have if I hadn't just revealed my vow to the world and all.

 

I've even forgotten what those prompts were. Okay. I remember one: "the waves roll in". This is the kind of phrase I loved when I was a girl. I lived in the middle of a large continent, with no access to or even view of an ocean. An ocean was, if I may put it this way, Terra Incognita. (Someone already is tweeting that I can't put it that way. Perhaps "Mare Incognito." But not Terra. I knew that, you know. You didn't have to yell at me.)

 

Back to the story—or what passes for one. I knew no ocean when I was little. Our body of water was Deer Creek, which ran through the town. There were also the lakes up the road in Monticello, known as the Gateway to the Lakes, such as they were, of central Indiana. But we never had much truck with Monticello except in two ways. First, a group of Delphi intelligentsia (don't ask) met monthly at a cottage on one of the lakes. The cottage was called "The Purple Privy." And second, believe it or not, big bands on tour used to show up at one of the resort's venues. We bumpkin high school students could drive fifteen miles north to see and hear Stan Kenton band, complete with Maynard Ferguson and his impossibly high trumpet. And I remember going with friends to hear the Dave Brubeck Trio. In my mind's eye I see it as a dancing venue, though why anyone ever thought to dance to Dave Brubeck's music I can't tell you.

 

In any case, I didn't dance that night. I stood—the whole evening—at the edge of the small bandstand, in love with Paul Desmond and his alto sax. He was a musician. He was drop-dead good-looking. And he was playing, in the sexiest possible way, the sexiest possible instrument. I didn't take my yearning eyes off him all night.

 

This was long before the concept of band-following groupies. But I do believe that if he had responded to my gaze and had approached me at the intermission or the end of the concert, I would have followed him wherever he wanted to lead me--like Mary's little lamb (and this would have been against the rule as well as against the law). I like to think that now. But in reality, I'm pretty sure I would have fled like the little Catholic virgin I was.

 

 
Copyright © 2019 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
Audible.Ca: go to https://www.audible.ca and search for Ann Tudor
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