Snowy Speculations

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If I could paint, I would have tried to replicate the landscape very early this morning. Illuminated by the faintest hints of light and hours before sunrise, the cold, stark landscape lay completely still in its snowy blanket. Naked trees stood proudly and quietly against this backdrop, this palate of pure white an unforgiving place for any creature, big or small, to attempt to cross without drawing attention to its existence at this time. Even our ancient tire swing looked sleepy and droopy, suspended precariously close to the ground, as if the effort of hanging from a tree limb was too much for it. To the east, the only rays of light visible were the ones coming from the across the river, and even those seem hushed and muffled, like a child tired and murmuring not to wake them up just yet.  The young families down the road have gone all out with Christmas lights this year. Bright colours adorn the night skies and my neighbours even have a Christmas Cat and a Christmas Dinosaur that i
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Moth in the Bed Sheets

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Growing up in a family of six kids, my mother would hang laundry out to dry as often as she could. This was of course a way to use less energy and save on utility bills with a large family. I remember bringing in towels that were so hard and crisp that they scraped your skin as you dried yourself on their abrasive texture. My brothers' jeans stood up on their own retaining the stiffness of human legs and the trademark indentation where the clothespins had secured them in place on the line.

Our generation uses the dryer for convenience and ease. Out of the washer and into the dryer. Easy peasy! When we moved to our rural property, I insisted that I wanted a clothesline. My husband, who does nothing halfway, had custom metal posts made at his work that were approximately 20 feet high. These were cemented into the ground and a 75 foot clothesline was erected.  But that was not all. He built a platform for me to reach the line complete with stairs and railings on either side and a raised shelf for placing the laundry basket and clothespins on.

There is something ethereal about watching sheets flap in the wind, a sort of meditation in observing their gentle billowing in the breeze and then the unexpected snap back when a strong gust of wind comes up suddenly. For years our family got used to falling asleep in a cloud of fresh outdoors every time the sheets came in off the line. That was until the incident!

Our youngest daughter woke us up screaming bloody murder one night. As I raced into her room, I found her jumping up and down and hitting maniacally at her bedding screaming, "A bug! A bug! It was crawling on me!" 

She was shaking and absolutely terrified. I went through her sheets and found nothing. I assured her that there was no reason to be alarmed and that she had just had a bad dream. But she was insistent that I look one more time.

More to appease my daughter than anything else, I folded back the sheets one more time and there it was! A giant moth, probably just as terrified of us as we were of it staring up at us with those bulging compound eyes. I gently scooped it up in a towel and carried it outside back to where it came from and let it go into the night. I stripped her bedding and put new sheets back on that had not been on the line. Like a dog trying to find just the right spot to settle down in its bed, my daughter conducted a thorough double, then triple inspection of the new bedding and was finally able to close her eyes and go to sleep.

With this crisp fall weather upon us, I still hang out blankets and sheets to get that extra autumn smell of woodfire and drying leaves. As I make the beds, the smell of fresh air is all around me and it brings a sort comfort that is hard to replicate. But the rules have changed in our house. No more "off the closthesline and onto the beds" for this family. Even after things are dried to crisp and brought in off the line, my daughter's laundry spends another ten minutes on tumble-dry, making sure that no unwanted hitchhikers will ever disrupt her sleep again! So now with the evening darkness upon us so much earlier, the only moths that are around this house are the ones hovering around the exterior light dying to get in. And there they will stay!

Lolita Schimann Hale

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