Ronda Rich

Syndicated Columnist

It was in the gloaming of a hot, July evening. I was dressed in jeans, an Elvis T-shirt, and farm boots, cleaning weeds near the stream that runs under our driveway.

A bristling wind suddenly lifted the leaves and I looked up to see the skies darkening further. I called to the dogs.

“Y’all c’mon. It’s comin’ up a cloud. Let’s go!” The two of them — a red dachshund and a black and white beagle — jumped into our farm vehicle and off we took, bumping across the pasture and through the gate of the black, boarded fence. Heading to the barn, just in front of the big drops of rain that had begun to fall, my mind slipped back to a memory long-forgotten, It was another summer afternoon. I was 10 or 11. Mama called urgently from the back of the house. “Go get the clothes off the line. Hurry! It’s comin’ up a cloud.”

Through the kitchen I dashed, the back screen door slamming softly behind with the echo that only a screen door can make: soft, sweet, homey. I cherish every screen door we have. Still, I can hear my college boyfriend coming in the side door, into the den, holding onto the screen door to close it gently. And Daddy, from his recliner, where he was either reading the newspaper or the Bible, saying, “Hey there, son. C’mon in.”

Both of them are gone now but it’s a sweet memory that lingers.

Vividly, I can see the kind smiles they exchanged.

Back to the rain. Barefooted, as I was most summer days, I began pulling off the sheets from the clothes line, just as large, as crystal drops fell. Mama took tremendous pride in her laundry. She had a formula for how she hung the clothes out. Sheets and pillow cases, first.

Towels next, then shirts and pants.

Daddy’s underwear and Mama’s slips were discretely hung behind the sheets on the second line.

“You don’t want folks seein’ our private lives from the road,” she said as she instructed me in this household chore.

Many are the times that I watched as Mama finished with hanging out the clothes, then stood back to admire it. She’d tuck a couple of leftover clothes pins into the pocket of her gingham apron, then fold her arms and smile.

“Now, ain’t that a pretty wash?” she asked, mainly to herself but if I didn’t answer, she’d turn around and say, “Do you see how pretty this wash is?”

One day, as she started back into the house, she sat down on the porch steps next to me. “Let me tell you something – you can tell a lot about people by their clothes lines.” This was one of Mama’s many self-formed philosophies – one no longer usable as a measurement because laundry dryers have replaced clothes lines. She believed that both a good housekeeper and a good wage earner were measured in worth by the clothes that hung on the line. She enjoyed craning her neck to look at other clothes lines as Daddy drove us somewhere.

That, too, was back in the days when the words “let’s go for a ride” were a pure tinkling of joy to the ears.

I used to dream of growing up and having a clothes line. I talked about it most of my life. Now, we live on enough land that would allow for plenty of them but I don’t have (as the mountain people say) “nary a one.”

But I still have Mama’s because I have her house. Daddy built it, using heavy iron pipe, about three inches in diameter. He welded together three T-shaped posts then strung three lines of durable wire from end to end. A few years ago, a mighty oak fell on an end-post and bent it almost double.

It was a summer afternoon and it had come up a cloud. All-a-sudden.

Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of “Sapelo Island: A Stella Bankwell Mystery.” Visit www. rondarich.com to sign up for her free weekly newsletter.