Abstract Blue Floral by Anya Holloway

Ma hangs the wash on the long clothesline in the backyard of our butter-yellow house. The sea rolls in the distance. I watch from my window.

When the heat of high summer is a skin and the sea breathes from its deep belly, in the midst of that season heavy with close dreams, she crosses the warm grass, barefoot, laundry basket lopping against her hip. She sets it down and stretches to see the dull blue of the water, the languid gulls. From the basket she pulls curtains of rain and lays them, smooth and silvered, over the line. Her hands are dark against their shimmer. A wind builds, sweeps, drops across the yard, bending tired petals, washing dull leaves, pittering against my window as I draw it closed.

At summer’s end, Ma reaches into her great deep basket and pulls out a sheet of heavy fog. She snaps it straight and pins it to the clothesline. It blocks the sea, the trees, muzzles the sound. The air sweats diamonds that cling to the green of the grass at the cliff’s edge, the spider’s web in my window.

One brittle morning she picks a heavy shawl of snow from the basket; white, edges as sharp as ice. Watching her pin it to the line, my breath frosts my window. Outside all turns grey and white; air as cold as steel, sea as cold as iron.

When the winter starts to ease, I watch Ma, wearing her red rubber boots, carrying a crisp new laundry basket, round and deep. She sets it down on the softening snow by the clothesline. She cracks her wintry back and smiles at the sea, up at the bluing sky. Digging into her basket, she pulls out a jacket of fresh grass, embroidered with tulips, lilacs, daffodils; its buttons: spring buds. She takes two wooden clothespins from her pocket and clips the jacket to the line. She walks to the shore, her path traced by the yellow, pink, the purple of flowers of make-you-weep beauty.

When the sky is high blue, I open the window and the dust winks in the sunlight. The air breathes against my cheek.

One morning I hear the creak of the screen door opening below and I watch Ma carry the laundry basket snug against her belly. She is wearing a white dress with fuchsia buttons and a whirl of butterflies across its back. I see the sun catch the down on her arms. Her hair curls against her pinking cheek.

She sets the basket down and reaches into it to pull out a blanket of frost-edged air, clear and knife-sharp. Carefully, she lays it over the clothesline and steps back, warming her hands under her arms. The wind rocks stray leaves to the ground where, unseeing, she crunches them underfoot.

The breeze turns chill. Ma catches her breath, picks up the basket and hurries indoors.
Below me, the door closes tight.

I draw my window down, noticing
jeweled leaves on the trees
deep blue of the sea
sharpening of the sky.

The early fall of night.

Up Close and Personal by Virginia Houston

I am trying to learn silence. It’s not easy.

I am trying to remove clutter. That, too, is difficult.

By silence I mean moments of stillness longer than a few seconds. You know: when nothing hums, beeps, whistles, dings, roars, revs, crackles, or chirps. When no one talks, cries, yells, or mutters. When I can see an idea form in my head without interruption and can dwell on it for more than a millisecond.

And by clutter I don’t just mean the discarded bags, random receipts, single glove, broken pencils, and never-to-be-opened mail that gather by the door or spill over the counter. I also mean the to-dos waiting for me in my computer, on the desk, in the kitchen, or rattling around in my brain. It only takes few seconds after I wake in the morning for them to swarm around my mind, poke at me for my attention. They cling to me all day, despite my efforts to flick them off.

Like most women, I have no idea what it’s like to have nothing to do.

Quiet. An empty morning. A clean slate. Virginia Woolf, you’ll remember her, said every woman should have a room of her own.

Room? I’d be happy to have an hour.

The rare time I think it’s possible—usually when the chaos of the morning is over—a tiny bubble of effervescence forms in my chest. This is it. I can concentrate. I can go to ground. Begin to remind myself who I am, what I’m here for. Plan something. Read a page. Write a paragraph. Eat lunch in peace.

But when I pour a coffee, I notice jam stains and important mail on the counter. To heat my soup in the microwave, I have to put the turntable back on its moorings and scrape the red splatters off the walls. Does no one else notice these?

And those precious twenty minutes? Gone. Eaten up in the dishrag, expended on the phone, or flown into cyberspace in the form of “urgent” emails.

This is such an old story it’s cliché. I felt the need for quiet decades ago, and I’m still talking about it, but now with friends in the next generation. If it’s not doctors’ appointments or soccer games or all-night puking or the late-night run to the grocery store then it’s the meeting with the school psychologist (again) or a ripped zipper on the snowsuit. It’s the missing button, the late registration, and what the hell has the dog rolled in now?

We can crow all we want about how feminism has improved ordinary women’s lives. And to some extent, that’s true. I was chief cook for our first thirty years of marriage; my husband is in charge for the next thirty. Our one remaining resident offspring cooks and cleans. Okay, not to my standards—red splatters, remember?—but it’s a start.

I often leave my own house to have a thought. I am lucky to be able to do this; most women I know cannot. Recently, I flew across the country to go on retreat with my sister in an abbey outside a prairie city. I found a room, uncluttered days, and avoided email. Or tried to.

As I sat watching the magpies on the tops of the pines, looking at the snow sparkle on the horizon, I remembered my mother’s words when she was old and blind and only a year away from death.

I feel useless, she said. No one needs me. What’s life if you’re not useful?

I argued with her then. Don’t be silly, I said. None of us needs to be anything other than our selves to be valuable. We only need to be: that’s what’s precious. You are you.

I believed what I was saying then. I believe it now. But I still struggle. What would happen if I didn’t write that letter, clean up that mess, call the clinic, answer the door, attend that so-important meeting? Would someone else see the crud on the sink? Remember the birthday? Would I feel freer, or would I feel guilty about not showing up, not pulling my weight? The forces of our culture—family habits, community and gender expectations, that rushing river of life pulling us forward–are difficult to resist. How much noise and clutter in my life is out of my hands? How much do I create? Do I have a secret wish–god help me, Mom–to be useful?

I’m not sure. But I’m off to make coffee in a clean kitchen (not my own) and to settle into a chair by the window where I can overlook an unfamiliar horizon, and think about it.