Late Laundry

By Zoi Athanassiadou

Arthritis means Grandma can peg the washing out no longer, her fingers crook-boned like the twigs pleading below the long iron lines for our towels to drop on their last leaves. I hang it all out the way she taught me, snow-bleached laundry steaming with handmade soap—don’t ask whose hands, the answer is always the same even if the clothespegs are fingered by baby-shrivelled tips now. It’s the same big-toe-holed socks and frayed mending, the same rags meant for wiping off coughs, the same wash-softened knitwear dyed in old and ready mourning. My knuckles whiten around double-rowed undershirts and unworn coats. The door’s closed behind me, glass showing nothing but reflecting, crystallising my eyes. Wet cloth drags like flesh on my hands if it dries if I close them. Billowing soon bends the iron drying rack hanging from the balcony, leaf dried up to be blown away. Grandpa’s beard smiles expectantly out of the rails’ blanketed snow. A trickle sloshes in the washtub—I know better than to try it with my hand, wakewater’s colder than winter’s heart, she taught me. But however numbing the wind blows to my cheeks, winter isn’t here for Grandma yet. There’s still laundry to wash out.

Zoi Athanassiadou is a writer that oscillates between the wonders of antiquity and the realities of a university student in Greece. You can reach out to her on Twitter @zoiathwrites or on Mastodon @zoiathwrites@mindly.social.