Cotton sheets flying

On the line capturing the

Essence of sunbeam

 

 

 

This week in Corrogue…

 

We still are subject to frost at night but we have been having a spate of surprisingly warm days. It’s as if we skipped the slow, stately progress of the typical Irish spring, with its increments of snowdrop, daffodil, primrose, creeping buttercup and then field buttercup and jumped forward to the usual cool Irish summer. Our damson tree sported a single blossom this morning. The apple trees are budding. I hope the frosts will dissolve. A late hard frost last year put paid to any fruit.

With the damp showery weather temporarily in abeyance I strung up the washing line this week. Load after load of damp laundry was pegged out in the sunny breeze to dry. I have to confess that this is an occasion for one of the most primitive (or is it primal) pleasures to people who make and keep homes. There is nothing quite like the scent of laundry that has dried in sun and wind. I bury my nose and inhale deeply. I sniff essence of sunlight and ozone.  

Here in the Northwest of Ireland we enjoy the cleanest air in Europe. This is very unlike the laundry days of my friend Brenda’s childhood. In Salford near Manchester during the 1940s smog enveloping England before the Clean Air Acts, they hung out clean laundry and pulled in dry, sooty ‘washing’. The smog was everywhere – inside and out. There was no way of escaping it, so Brenda informs me. So I feel especially blessed as I breathe in this scent. It’s such a simple pleasure. But it is was that very few people may experience if they live in built up areas with lots of motorcars or manufacturing nearby. 

It’s a singular experience perhaps as endangered as the corncrake or the capercaillie. 

A number of years ago some advertiser used the tagline “Accept no imitations!”  There is no way that the scent of sunshine and a stiff breeze blowing over gorse bushes and flowering blackthorn can be synthesized and put in a bottle of fabric conditioner.  

© 2006 Bee Smith