A Rose Blooms in Brooklyn

 Quite the surprise, arising the morning of January 1st,

to find a rose blooming in a Brooklyn backyard. My first thought on this first day was, "Why is this rose blooming? Doesn't it know it's winter?" And such a large, beautiful rose!

Then I looked up and was surprised again, by two tall towers--iron exclamation points--rising along the back fence between two backyards in this row of brownstones. "What were those towers?," I asked my hosts.

Turns out that long ago, these towers anchored an elaborate web of clotheslines that stretched back to the apartments. I'm guessing the lines were mounted on pulleys, so that residents could hang laundry all the way out to the towers, then "pulley" it on back when it was dry.

It looked something like this--not unlike a harbor full of miniature sailboats. 

Sailing and line drying clothes are both ways to collaborate with nature. Both require being tuned in, aware of the outdoors, alert to shifts in the wind and the weather. Lacking an outdoor clothesline, I can still collaborate by hanging my clothes on a rack, then return the next day to find that nature has effortlessly dried them. 

Machines have stolen us away from collaborations with nature, yet, embedded in concrete, these iron towers remain, soaring skyward like the masts of idled sailboats, still standing ready to launch us back to a more sustainable lifestyle. Patiently indifferent to a changed world, they teach the rose to bloom in January.

More about what it was like to hangdry clothes out the back window can be found in a post on Ephemeral New York.