This photo reminds me of when my mom and grandma would clothespin their wet laundry to the clothesline and wheel those articles of clothing out into the backyard where they would dance like ghosts in the breeze. It seems so ancient and archaic now, and even sort of surprising that people would have no qualms about airing their clean laundry in full view of others, even if only the neighbors. It seems to reflect that people in the 1960's, at least in Brooklyn NY, had no pretensions, had a sort of democratic view of life, the recognition that we all wore clothing and it was all more or less the same. If we all lived on the same block, how different could we really be from one another? It's a sweet nostalgia to think of this faraway Brooklyn of my childhood, when I stood beside Mom and handed her the clothespins, plucked from a cloth bag which existed specifically for the purpose of holding them. The bag hung from a metal cart upon which the metal laundry basket sat, a basket resembling a lobster cage. Clothespins came in two varieties, the kind that clipped and the kind that didn't; the latter type was boring, just a 2-pronged wooden fork into which you wedged the clothesline and clothing, but the clippy kind was fun, you could clip them on your nose, your ears, and other places more or less painful (ears were particularly painful!). Today I have a capo for my guitar (as do most guitarists) which is of the clippy variety, very much like a clothespin.
Does anyone still hang their clothes on a line anymore? Gosh no, we're too busy nowadays to perform such a time-consuming manual task, standing in the open air, the breeze caressing our nostrils, pausing to admire our surroundings, seeing the birds, the trees, the flowers, the neighbors ... maybe we should slow down, re-evaluate, buy some clothespins.
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