The Laundry of Rovinj

From Slavenka Drakulić's How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed ~

By looking at the clotheslines I can tell who is a good housekeeper, whose laundry is white enough and properly hung, how big the family is, who lives alone. My grandma taught me all that, and how to hang a man's shirts, trousers, or pullovers. She taught me that you could tell a lot, even the character of people, just by looking at clothes. Laundry was like an open book to her.

'That woman over there, she is playing the lady. Look how many nylons she's hung out!' Or, 'The one from the first floor, she must be stingy, she doesn't use bleach at all.'

We would walk down the street, and she would suddenly point something out to me: 'There, behind that window, lives a young woman with a baby, you can tell it by the dozen diapers, the nightgown and bra. It's a baby boy, his tiny pullover and cap are blue. A man lives there, too, perhaps the husband, judging from the the shirts and socks. But they don't live alone, there is an older person. See the black woolen dress, still dripping? Perhaps she is a widow.'

 

[My grandma] taught me to observe, to look carefully at things around me, however small and unimportant they might appear to be, so I could learn more about people. In that way, she told me, 'In time everything will be revealed to you.'

Maybe because of her, today I am not tempted to buy a dryer. I think I will always hang my clothes outside for the sheer poetry of it, so I can take them down from the line, and feel the smell of wind. In fact, I think this is the only way to smell the wind -- with your face buried deep in freshly dried sheets.