Joy: Mary's World

Mary, among her many domestic chores, takes pride in her Monday laundry. Into her 80s she hung all her laundry outdoors to dry. (At 92 a dryer still doesn't stop her from hanging items beneath the covered back porch.)

For many years the clothesline in the backyard was framed by four iron poles embedded in concrete, the four corners describing a great rectangle. The clothesline reached around the perimeter and also ran in two diagonals to make a central X. Mary hung the sheets in an outer row and propped up the sagging lines with long wooded poles. On inner lines she pinned white shirts with outstretched sleeves, khaki pants that billowed to the wind, along with underwear ordered by respective wearer: Mary's, Clint's, son Clint's, and Ed's--all in a row, upward of 28 pairs, immaculately white from hand rubbing on a ribbed-glass washboard and a Clorox dipping. No hash mark survived her scrupulous scrubbing.

Mary declared time and again, that when the wash was done and the laundry hung on the line by wooden clothespins spaced in tidy order, it was beyond words to express what she felt. She was utterly joyful.

Eventually, when only Mary and Clint were left at home, she continued to experience a Monday morning ecstasy at the sight of Clint's laundry drying on the clothesline.

One February day, when fresh snow glistened and laundry was a-drying, Mary was compelled by an even richer joy. The beauty of the moment swept through her. With a long clothesline pole she drew a huge heart in the snow and inscribed it, "I love you, Clint." For Mary this was a rare display of emotion.

Later that day, she and a friend shopped for meat at a country butcher near Chadds Ford, PA. While waiting for their order, Betsy Wyeth, wife of famed artist Andrew Wyeth, breezed in, protesting the cold and snow, though she wore a luxurious fur coat. Betsy declared her intention to make beef vegetable soup for Andy. "Tell me girls," she said to Mary and her friend, "tell me how you make your beef vegetable soup."

Mary used the occasion to relate to Betsy Wyeth, how earlier that day the beauty of the snow and the joy of Clint's underwear on the clothesline had stirred her to declare her love with a snowy valentine. "That's so sweet. I'll have to tell Andy," Betsy Wyeth responded. She took away Mary's recipe for hearty vegetable beef soup, too.

Whenever I see a reproduction of Andrew Wyeth's iconic and melancholic "Christina's World,"--in the foreground a paraplegic woman sprawled on an overgrown hillside with a decrepit house on the crest,--I envision "Mary's World."

In "Mary's World" a midlife woman in babushka and car coat inscribes a heart into a winter's cover of snow with a long wooden clothes pole. In the background white boxer shorts billow in the wind.

[Ed Searl]