In a country that is never dry, the air condenses on your always-curly hair. In alternating seasons of monsoons and stickiness, you have learned to hang laundry because dryers are luxurious and electricity is iffy. Locals hang because it has only ever been the final act of washing. Everything clings. The sheets, too, are sweating. Hours later, you return to the balcony and rotate the line. Thin cottons are removed to allow more airflow. Dry. Dry. A meditation on what it means never to be thirsty. A neighbor waves, but you’ve forgotten how to say hello.
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Quick, wash everything. After the first frozen jeans, you learn to survey the street for socks on windowsills. There is never enough daylight. You journey through the fabric softener aisle cradling the dictionary. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The neighbors don’t smile on the street because streets are not places for smiling. You learn summer is the season of beating sheets with woven paddles. In the sun, plastic pins will snap if pinched abruptly. Your skin bears the scent of chemical lavender. Nothing pays off. A sweater on the radiator can be worn three days later.
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You started to hang when your dryer broke and your wife had read an article: a social experiment to separate yourself from the neighbors. Each day is a cycle of wash, hang, fold: the primary-colored pins moving through your fingers like latticework, or pinching aphids off the hydrangeas. Yes, you have a garden. You are a garden. You tell yourself that you could’ve been a missionary or lived the expatriate dream, but if you believed this you’d already be in Honduras, or Spain. Hanging laundry is your little gift to the world. No, it’s the world’s gift to you.
