Die Wäschespinner

After several days of rain, grey clouds and chill, it’s a bright, sunny day with just a few full white clouds. The trees in the wood next to the house are now fully in leaf; they tower against the sky, fresh green dramatic against the deep blue. From this first floor flat, even as I crane my head back, they rise so high I can’t see their tops. From within their hidden depths, birds celebrate the beautiful spring day.

During a phone call just now, my sister-in-law in Ireland and I compared notes on the weather. ‘It’s the first good day all week. Up and down the street,’ I said, everyone’s got wash on the line.’

‘I know,’ said she. ‘On mornings like that, I look around and say, “Now what can I wash?”’

‘Exactly! I do the same. Today I have the sheets and the bath towels hanging.’

And I do. The line is full of flapping yellow towels and white sheets, pale sails of a ship in a vast emerald sea. Standing at the window and looking down on them in the lawn below, I am filled with a calm joy. The sheets fill and billow, the four-sided wäschespinner whirls, and diamond-shaped shadows dapple the grass.

The clothesline is new, put it up a few weeks ago. Himself dug the hole, mixing and pouring the concrete, then carefully carving our initials and the date into pale-grey mass. I stood by, impatient to use the new line.

The fact is, this is my first clothesline. I can barely remember the clothes hanging outside the kitchen window of my childhood home. I must have been nine or ten when my mother got the automatic tumble-dryer, and after that, I don’t remember her using the clothesline. From then until we moved to Ireland three years ago, the main part of my laundry went into the dryer. Delicates and things that might shrink, of course, were dried on hangers, but that didn’t require a clothesline.

It’s indicative of the casual use – waste – of fuels that is a part of life in America. A neighbour told me when we first moved to Thousand Oaks, California, that there was a city law against clotheslines. I don’t know if she had her facts straight, and I never investigated. What would they do, anyway, give you a ticket if your laundry offended your neighbour? However, in 17 years living there, I never saw a clothesline full of wash. Whether there was a law or not, hanging laundry on a line just wasn’t done.

It’s ironic, really. In Southern California, we suffered through hot dry summers stretching through October, basked in the sun on Christmas Day, had barbecues on New Year’s Day, and restricted our watering because of years-long droughts. In Ireland, where rain may arrive at any moment, any time of the year, many only reluctently use their tumble dryers. If laundry hung on the line is caught in a rain shower, it is shrugged off as a ‘second rinse.’

In Ireland, though, we never got around to putting up a clothesline. I couldn’t decide where to put it – oh monumental decision! – and my mother-in-law, living next door, graciously allowed me to use hers. It was only about 50 metres from our back door, and we were back and forth between the two houses frequently anyway.

So when we moved to this flat a year ago, it was the first time in my life I had access to neither clothesline nor dryer. For the past year, I’ve been hanging my wash on a tublular stainless steel clothes horse, setting it up in the garden on good days or in the utility room where the boiler roars on bad ones. About a metre high and extending about a metre and a half wide, it did the job adequately. But never, until now, could I wash several loads on a single day. Never, until now, could I wash and hang the large bath towels and the sheets all on the same morning.

This evening when I take down the laundry, the socks and towels will be a little stiff, without the fluffiness that comes from a tumble dryer. The sheets and tea towels, too, will show some creasing, turned in at the corners and imprinted with the impression of the clothes pegs. They will be also stiff and slightly awkward to fold. But they will smell as sweet and fresh as the green of the leaves against the blue sky, and bring with them the sun of this May day. Mundane as this is, it is for me a source of quiet joy.

Connected

It’s a bright, sunny and warming (to 11 C) morning, in contrast with the rain and cold of yesterday afternoon. May it continue. I intend take the bike and ride down the bike path to the Altstadt, perhaps to see something of the commemoration of the day in the platz in front of the Dom.

Just a few minutes after my husband left this morning, the doorbell rang for the first time since we’ve been in the flat. I had just started to sort the laundry to use in the new washing machine and, in fact, was still in my dressing gown and more disheveled than usual.

I was confused when I opened the door to an unfamiliar young woman, not older than 25, I’d say, wearing a jacket with a logo and three lime green boxes under her arm. Odd. I wasn't expecting any packages.

As always – it happens afresh with each encounter – I was disconcerted when she addressed me in German. Isolated as I am in the flat all day, moving in my narrowly defined world, continuing to relate to it in English through books and magazines, the internet and in conversations with Himself, it is disorienting to be confronted again with the reality of a German-speaking world just beyond our door.

In the stream of German I caught at last our surname and the penny dropped. She was from Telekom Austria and the boxes contained our new landline phone and broadband modem. At last, after only a week, we would be connected. We had been told it would be two weeks. (When we moved to Ireland, we waited three months for a landline; broadband took many months more.)

The young woman, with very short breached-blonde hair and capable working hands, was disconcerted as well, her English being not particularly fluent. And we needed to have a conversation. Where were the phone outlets? Did we want the phone and the internet connected in the same room? And more.

I found my mobile and dialed my husband’s Blackberry. When I held it out to her, she reeled back just slightly, her look saying, ‘Don’t do this to me!’ However, she took the phone. The first thing she said into the phone was, ‘Do you speak German?’ and it turns out that Rosetta Stone is paying off. Soon they were conversing auf Deutsch, and we were on our way. (He tells me now that he handed his phone over to the German-speaker he was meeting with, so it was a three-way conversation.)

As she worked away, I got dressed and continued with the laundry in the nearly child-like state I inhabit these day. Unable to communicate beyond a few stammered words and sign language, I feel at times a kind of lightness, the lack of responsibility that accompanies my inability to understand or be understood.

That doesn’t compensate for the frustrations though. We bought new washing machine last week, and it was delivered complete with instructions and manual, auf Deutsch, of course. Downstairs I stared at the control panel. I recognise for word for ‘cotton’ and the word for wool, but what is Koch-/Buntwäsche? I came upstairs and typed it into the Google translator. Something cooking?

The young woman had just come into the room. I showed her the manual. ‘Ah, so,’ she said. ‘Neu?’

I pointed to the phrase. What does this mean?

Ah. ‘Not black. Not white. Coloured.’

A mixed load. That would work.

Downstairs I turned the knob to Buntwäsche Eco and set the temperature to 40. Pressing the button labelled Tür, I felt a bit reckless. At least it was all socks, underwear and assorted towels – nothing that required special care. I’d just have to see if it works.

This is me, the obsessive worrier about instructions and procedures. Who keeps a file of every manual for every appliance I’ve ever owned. Including watches and pocket calculators. Who wants to know How Things Work. Who figures if the engineers designed the machine to work a particular way, that’s the way it should be done.

I walked away.

Upstairs the young woman had the line working. ‘Your husband said you had a' – gesturing, she fumbled unsuccessfully for the words  – 'from Ireland?' Ah, yes, the phone itself.

She continued. ‘He didn’t know if it would work here.’

We were in the shared office, which is still piled with cartons to be unpacked. The handset had been in my office in Ireland, so it must be in one of these. I started pulling things out of one box and pointed to another, indicating she should root through it. And we were lucky; eventually we pulled out the base and then one, then another, of the handsets.

We tested it and it worked. We were set to go. After she had explained to me, seeming more confident in her English, where the cables needed to connect to the wiring, how to install the software for the modem and what light – she called it a lamp – on the modem had to be steady, I complimented her on her English.

She was pleased but dismissive. ‘Everyone learns it in school. But school is long time ago now.’

‘I must learn German,’ I told her.

‘I think German is very hard to learn. Very hard. Even I, I have problems writing it. So many rules. For writing. And they change every week.’

I doubted that was true, but we were nearing the limit of mutual comprehension.

‘I’m a writer,’ I tried to explain. ‘And it’s hard not being able to speak to people. Not being able to use words.’

I didn’t think she got me. I tried a different way.

‘My work is writing. Words are my work.’

‘Yes,’ she said, as though she understood. ‘Words are work.’

We shook hands on the landing. I was sorry to see her go.