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A Clothesline Tackle

We enjoy the mini-essay about little things. Belloc was good at it (there's a passage in The Path to Rome about windows that we've been meaning to post during one of the slow weekends). Jeff Cumbert at Hallowed Ground has a good one this morning:

With T.S. O'Rama I am proud to share an affinity for the sight of clotheslines. (If you haven't read his book, send him an e-mail and place your order today!) What is it about a clothesline that so delights? Is it perhaps just a fascination with the Other Side, with the poor and unsophisticated? I don't think so. Rather, when you see a home with a clothesline, you can be sure that: 1) a woman lives there, and that is good; 2) a woman lives there who toils willingly for her man and her children, and that is better; 3) a woman toils, and that means there is love; 4) there lives someone who manages to survive, in the 21st century, without certain artificial "necessities"; 5) there lives someone totally unconcerned with the derision of middle class snobs. Point # 5 is important. So much of the bondage of modernity derives from an obsession with majority opinion. When you see a clothesline, you know that some people, at least, are free.