cleaning

Springtime at the Meier House means stretching out the retractable clotheslines on the back of the new garage and drying our laundry with sunlight and fresh air. It’s kind of a yearly tradition here. Come late-March you’ll start seeing sheets, duvet covers, towels, curtains and other laundry flapping in the wind. After being cooped up in the stale indoor air all winter, there’s nothing more refreshing than laundry dried outdoors. It makes the laundry and, in the case of bedding, the entire room smell as fresh as a summer afternoon. Unless, that is, the farm across the street from our house is spreading manure. Suddenly, as we experienced over the weekend, that fresh air takes on a whole different fragrance. Did you know that a strong manure odor will transfer to laundry that’s drying on a clothesline? We certainly didn’t think it would! But we were wrong. The bedroom still smells like a summer afternoon … if you’re spending that afternoon standing in a cow pasture. Cows: 1, Misters: 0.

After complaining about the window box and its persistent flooding flaw, we’ve had few dry weeks during which we’ve been able to enjoy the box and its bounty. I plopped these sunflowers in the box earlier this summer knowing that if it flooded, they’d be goners. Fortunately, we haven’t seen a return of the blustery storms we had at the beginning of the season. And so these sunflowers have been peeking at us through the window. But of course we know this dry box is only going to last so long. And the frustrating thing is that we’ve figured out reason for the flooding – and have even fixed it –  but we’re not able to get to it as often as we need to.

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