“Distrust everything, if you have to…”
As a firm believer in clotheslines and keeping my bills low, we don’t have a clothes dryer.
In past rainy summers, with children in cloth diapers, I spent time in laundromats on Sunday mornings before selling maple syrup at a farmers market.
After a span of rainy days, I eventually break down (again, this no-dryer commitment might be simply stubbornness or gratuitous ego, pushed far beyond rationality) and load two dryers in the Hardwick laundromat. I bring a book and read on the porch of the Inn across the street. Behind the Inn, the Lamoille curves through town. On the river’s other side, a house burned earlier this summer. Now, what remains slides down the bank, piers of a narrow porch first, the back clapboard wall soon to follow.
Unintentionally, I’ve chosen busy Friday afternoon, and the intersection is jammed with traffic and pedestrians. I’m reading about schizophrenia and crime, about madness and civilization, and I keep looking over my shoulder at that empty house and its unanswered question of what’s happening here?
Eventually, I close the book, walk across the street, and fold our clothes warm with the dryer’s heat. Beside me, a little girl and her father study the line of dryers. She’s wearing a dress with bunnies. Seeing me, she pulls out her skirt. “Pink,” she offers.
I nod and answer, “Great-looking rabbit,” and then I head home.
Wait, for now.
— Galway Kinnell
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
