Today I needed something from days gone by.  Something nobody has anymore.  I needed a clothesline and clothespins.  Those tablecloths came out of soaking overnight in fairly good shape, but not good enough to put them in the dryer.  The dryer would permanently set the remaining stains.

So I carried them outside and laid them over bushes in the yard so the sun and wind could dry them.  Problem was, in Oklahoma, the wind also makes a wind sail out of a linen tablecloth.  The wind came rushing down the plain.  So that didn't work too well.

But it did dry them sufficiently. I just had to watch them to keep them from blowing away.  And the aroma of sun and wind dried linen was awesome.  It stirred a forgotten memory from my past.

Ken was in Okinawa for thirteen months, and I had gone back to Oklahoma to live with my folks.  There were three babies in the house.  Pat, who was not yet two, and Becky--four months old.  And mom had given birth to my sister Lisa 7 days before Becky was born.  (An unexpected bonus child--21 years younger than me.)  All three in diapers.

This was back in the days before disposable diapers.  We took the cloth diapers and folded them to fit.  Yes, they had to be washed. And hung on the line outside in the sun and Oklahoma wind.  During that 13 months, the washer, dryer, clothes-line and stack to be folded were a continuous cycle.  All of us were doing one or the other. 

Those tablecloths that I laid outside over the bushes, had that sun and wind's Oklahoma fresh aroma I remembered from long ago when I brought the clothes in from the line.  I haven't hung clothes out in a million years.  But the lovely fresh scent of clothes on the line is imbedded in my mind.