Thursday Laundry, and Other Small Magics
“There’s a particular kind of magic in a life that has room in it for hanging laundry in the sun.”
We have a ritual at our farmhouse (well, actually we have many — some of them even make sense) but one is: in good weather, sheets get washed and hung out on Thursdays. Today I carried the basket out, clipped the corners to the line, and stood back to admire the whole business — white sheets, blue sky, and the happy sound of the girls clucking away by the barn. I took a picture, the way you do when something ordinary suddenly strikes you as worth keeping. And standing there, I had one of those thoughts that sneaks up sideways: I get to do this. Every single Thursday, for as long as I want. There's a particular kind of magic in a life that has room in it for hanging laundry in the sun. Also, it saves my dryer for other things, and my sheets don't come out smelling like "Alpine Breeze," whatever that's supposed to be. They smell like actual air.
Sheets on a line will do that to you — turn your mind loose to wander. Mine wandered, as it happens, straight to dish towels.
I confess to having a small weakness for them. Not the kind you buy in a matched set of six, all coordinated within an inch of their lives, but dish towels you pick up one at a time, usually somewhere far from home, usually because it caught your eye or felt exquisite to touch. Just last weekend, at the NJ Sheep and Fiber Festival, I came home with a hand-woven one that I have no practical excuse for owning and no intention of apologizing for. This, of course, makes me want to try my hand at weaving... in my spare time, which is a phrase I use the way other people use "unicorn" — I've heard of it, I believe it exists for some people, but I've never actually seen one. But I digress.
I couldn't tell you when or where my dish towel obsession began. Somewhere along the way — a magazine article, maybe, read half-awake on an airplane — I remember a piece about a woman who collected dish towels the way some people collect postcards, and who loved nothing more than getting a look at what towel was hanging in your kitchen. There was something to that idea that stuck with me: a dish towel as a little flag of where you've been, or what you love, hung up in plain sight where nobody but you and the kitchen elves will ever see it.
It turns out I'm not alone in this. Poke around online and you'll find no shortage of people who feel exactly the same — travelers who bring home a tea towel from a trip instead of a magnet or a snow globe, because a towel is useful, it's pretty, and it doesn't take up a shelf or require dusting. As far as I'm concerned, those top the criteria for any souvenir. One writer put it about right: a good dish towel gives you a little flash of a pleasant memory in the middle of an ordinary day, right there at the sink, elbow-deep in suds, which is not usually when happiness comes looking for you.
Which brings me to the ones we sell here at DaisyFields Farm.
I didn't set out to sell dish towels because I thought they'd be a big seller. We stock them because I like them, and running a farm store does come with the occasional perk of stocking whatever you please and calling it "curating." I also suspect there are more of us out there — closet dish-towel people, hanging onto a scrap of somewhere we loved — than anyone admits to at parties. If you're one of us, come see what we've got. And if you're not one of us yet, well. Give it time. It sneaks up on you, same as a Thursday on our farm, full of clean sheets and blue sky.