The Neighborhood Line

This Sunday morning I looked out my window and saw that my sweet neighbor Mark had draped his large brown, blue, black, and white T-shirts over his back porch railing. Nearly all the neighborhood clotheslines have been taken down except ours, so people drape their clothes over fire escape railings and chain link fences, or they hang them by pinching them in their tenement storm windows.

I love to see clotheslines when we are out walking. "Look!" I say excitedly, pointing to a full clothesline, a poem blowing in the breeze. The line of clothes tells a simple story in fabric and shapes and colors: the row of wide white bloomers, the color wheel of Tee's, an assembly of children's jeans, the bedsheets of a Monday morning.