Being Hung Out to Dry

A Cold Afternoon

This has been a cold and quiet November afternoon.

The only sound in the house is the hum of the refrigerator and the snore of the dog who  nestles against me like a burr  to a sock.

  

The chill is due to the lack of fire in the  wood stove.  I did fill it with wood but not soon enough for it to 'catch' and so instead of going through the routine of making kindling and rearranging the split wood I have opted for donning a sweater 'from a corpse'*  while  waiting for someone else to do it when they come home from work.

  

The chilliness isn't really too bad to tolerate except that my violin is probably tuning out with every passing minute due to the change in temperature causing the shrinking and cooling of strings and  the accompaning give and take of its wooden frame.  This perhaps may explain the reasoning behind the term "winter fiddle"...as in the lyric of the song that starts out with "The twists  of your heart are like the strings of  a  winter's fiddle ."*

Thinking of wooden frames and cold puts me in mind of the wooden laundry clothes dryers they had in my mother's and grandmother's day.  If a person wants to know COLD all they have to do is hang some wet sheets and laundry outside on a line on a cold winter's day to 'dry' and then in about 3 hours haul them all back in again to drape, or rather LEAN them over a wooden rack.   Thinking of carrying frozen sheets inside puts me in mind of hauling slabs of drywall into the house.  I think the biggest fear would have to be chipping off a sleeve, pant leg,  or corner of a sheet while manoevering door jams.

 I distinctly remember playing hide and seek with my sister and brother, and crawling under the rack and getting wet because  the clothes were dripping.   I was so surprised that something that hard could be dripping water. I don't think I really could grasp the logic around  the idea that  you put something wet out to dry but, ultimately, you still had to bring it in to finish the job.  

  The  wooden window sills in the house would be laden with thick edgings of ice due to  the humidity  of the 'dry thawing' of the week's laundry.

  

  No Wonder our mothers and grandmothers had arthritic hands.

No Wonder window sills rotted out. 

 No Wonder fiddles sound the way they do.

* second hand clothes from a a thrift store

... a phrase  from the book "Love in the Time of Cholera"--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

* not a real lyric to a song.. I just made it up for effect.

What's the difference between a fiddle and a Chain Saw?
You can turn a chain saw off.

Why are fiddles better than guitars?
They burn longer.