Dead Housekeeping

Be a nine-year-old girl in the 50’s with a new baby sister and a mama with a clothesline that stretches the length of the yard. There’s a pole to make the line taller, you have to have that pole because if you don’t the line will hang low from the weight of the wet clothes which will drag in the dirt.

Keep the wooden clothespins in a handmade bag that you will never leave outside for fear of bees nesting inside or birds shitting on the pins.

The basket will be huge and very heavy and your mama will carry it.

Hang the Birdseye diapers together. (All items must always be hung with like items.)

What’s a Birdseye diaper?

Oh, the one with the straight edges.

Why do some have rickrack edges and are longer?

Just made that way.

Use separate pins for quick drying, hang side by side as the laundry has to flow.

Bring inside for folding. No clean laundry will ever sit in a basket even though in the future laundry will sit in baskets for days and sometimes weeks, even though there will be entire generations born who do nothing but move clean clothing unfolded from basket directly onto waiting children, for now the laundry will be folded.

Fold diapers like this:

- sides meet in middle

- fold back end down

Girls pee backwards, she says. It’s why she likes these diapers best: they’re thicker in the middle.

Hope that American Bandstand is still on.

- Linda Poore is a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, daughter (of dead people) and friend to a few. She is retired and spends many hours dog walking while recalling life events (of dead people.) She worries that when she’s gone no one will know her stories. (But it really doesn’t matter.) She lives in Virginia with her husband and her poodle, Penny Poore.