I can picture there being a day sometime in the future when Leah and I are baby-sitting a child. He or she is four- or five-years-old, bright, and full of many questions.
“Grandma,” the child will ask Leah, “what’s the difference between boys and girls?”
My dear wife will choose to assume that the child’s inquiry has nothing to do with biology but is instead entirely innocent, and so Leah’s answer will be: “Well honey, boys and girls are different in this way: When grandma hangs out the laundry, she is very neat. When grandpa does it, the clothesline looks like a mess.”
The pictures you see here are of our laundry drying operation on a day when my participation was strictly photographic. There is a continuity, a sense of order and even beauty to the way the clothes are hung, that would not be the case had I handled the task.
My job that day, as it is so often, was to happen along with a camera, to stop and make a visual note of something utterly ordinary, yet worthy.
For a fellow who is kind of a flop at hanging laundry, taking pictures of someone else's unintentional art is sometimes the best contribution I can make.
