One Book, One Bettendorf

I was baptized as a baby in the Presbyterian Church. My mother’s Presbyterian faith had pulled her through her father’s death when she was fourteen. My father was baptized Presbyterian but he wasn’t a church-goer. He was into the “spirit of St. Andrews”. We four siblings and Mom mandatorily attended church and Sunday school.

In high school, I dated a Catholic boy who’d take me to Mass on Saturday nights. He kept an ear to Vatican II. I had no idea of the impact of this history-making event

In college, I spent some time with a Catholic boy. He fell in love with a Baptist girl and attended church with her twice a week. I went to church with him one Sunday and a few of the congregation were speaking in tongues. He tearfully went forward to be healed. I was shocked at the transformation. What had pulled him away from his beliefs?

I married a Catholic in his parents’ parish.

He was a Vietnam combat veteran. Our first 7-8 years were very stressful. We moved to Omaha on a job transfer and became active in a young parish. During inquiry classes taught by a young priest, there was an older man who was one of the parish founders. The priest was discussing virgin births and said this was not an unusual phenomenon. It was attributed to nobility and anyone of high stature. This elderly gentleman left.

We had 2 children, a boy and girl. One October weekend after we had been to the school fund raiser, my husband was arrested on manslaughter charges. I decided after the media rape and police at our door, that I wouldn’t muddle in sorrow and self-pity. I had to get counseling and learn to Survive, and triumph in my own way

A mothering neighbor invited me to a retreat sponsored by the Blue Army, held within the secured walls of a 80-year-old discalced Carmelite monastery in its main chapel. When the order diminished, the Franciscan Brothers revitalized it.

Weary from stress, I listened to Brother Francis. I looked at a large crucifix and felt shrouded in security. I bowed my head in very humble prayer, slipping into a reverie I’d never known.

In total silence I hear my name spoken calmly in a man’s voice. I squeezed my eyes tight, then opened them again! Brother Francis was still talking as if uninterrupted. The pews were filled with women, and Brother Francis didn’t know me from Adam.

We are a family again and we share a few etched-in-stone Bible paraphrases to get us through the tough times: “God takes care of his little sparrows”, and “where two or more of you are gathered in His name…”

Carol Saldivar

It has been said that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I believe laundry is another certainty. I have seen it drying on the balconies of Europe, across rooms in Asia, and on riverbanks in South America. It’s considered picturesque in those places and often photographed by tourists. However, more and more in America, visible laundry seems to be considered an eyesore or perhaps evidence of poverty. There are even written neighborhood association covenants against the drying of laundry in one’s own yard.

Fortunately, when my family moved into our first (and current) home, it was in an older, kinder neighborhood that allowed visible laundry. Our backyard happened to already sport one of the best clotheslines around: two sturdy T-shaped metal poles strung with four lines down the length of one side of our backyard. I was thrilled and proud to be able to use this clothesline for its practical and historic purpose.

There is still a smattering of lesser clotheslines in the neighborhood but fewer and fewer of them. It is a tradition possibly deemed old-fashioned and certainly unnecessary by younger families moving in. Perhaps they’re embarrassed to hang their underwear in full view of supposedly prying judgmental eyes. Thus, for reasons of propriety, I always hang our underwear on the inside line. The line closest to the neighbors’ eyes is festooned with outerwear like jeans and khaki slacks.

There are certain rituals of segregation and placement involved in my hanging of laundry:
–big items hung first;
–T-shirts shaken out with a smart “snap” before being hung;
–socks paired;
–heavy or longer items hung at the ends and light or shorter items in the middle.

This penchant for outdoor laundry drying runs in my family. My mother still doesn’t own a dryer, and once in a conversation with my then-90+-year-old grandmother, she reminisced that after she hung her laundry out, she would take a seat in her lawn chair in the shade of a tree feeling a profound sense of satisfaction as she watched it flap colorfully in the breeze.

I have this same sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. For me, there’s even a certain mystical sense of being closer to nature: out of the box of the dryer with its machine-manufactured hot air, out of the box of the house with its regulated temperature, into the wide-open fresh air with its extreme temperature variations, its constant possibility of precipitation despite weather forecasts, its sunniness or cloudiness, its time of day, its seasonal cast of light, all filtered through the textures, shapes, and hues of a particular load of laundry.

I believe hanging laundry outside to dry is a simple, easy, natural, energy-saving, ecological, even artistic thing to do. As I write this, it is January in Iowa and the windchill is below zero. I hang inside then and wait till spring when, as always, I thrill to the rhythm of the basket, the pin, and the line and the feel of the sun and the wind.

Hedy N.R. Hustedde