Time and Tide

This morning, doing laundry, I finished a 10.94-lb. box of Tide, the first one that we bought in Brooklyn. It must have been one of the very first household supplies purchased in those cold, dark, uncertain days in mid-March. As milestones go, this is not a particularly dramatic one, but it has a certain poignancy. Every time I do laundry now I mourn my wonderful front-loading washing machine, which got clothes very clean without destroying the fabric. In these respects, the opposite of the current washing machine, which probably dates from the days when Ed Koch was mayor of this town and Tom Wolfe wrote "Bonfire of the Vanities." Although I really shouldn't complain; it's unusual to have a washing machine of any kind in a nonluxury apartment in New York. We have a dryer, too, which we never use; it has the peculiar feature of not venting outside, so it fills the apartment with lint and hot air while drying clothes with a pititful slowness. The apartment's open layout, its 11-foot ceilings, pipes running along the ceiling at the 10-foot mark, and ceiling fan have proved perfect for drying clothes the old-fashioned way. In North Carolina I had a sleek, folding clothesline, made in Belgium; I miss that too, and the wonderful smell that the line-dried fabric took on, though I do not miss being eaten by mosquitoes while trying to hang up the laundry in the summer. I miss the peaceful backyard... oh, I miss so many things, it does no good to enumerate them. Taking a taxi home at 2 the other morning across the Brooklyn Bridge, I looked down at the East River and the magical view of lights reflecting on the water and realized there is no place I would have left North Carolina for, except here. Not Paris, not Rome, not San Francisco, not Tuscany nor Mongolia nor Montana nor Maine, nor any of the other places I have at times dreamed of living in. There is no other place that would have been worth what we gave up. I don't know if this is really true, but it seemed so at that moment.