The Morning the Laundry Leaned
Seven in the morning, and the laundry hung along the rooftop railing had all leaned to one side. The white quilt was pressed right up to the edge, as if one more gust would send it over. Looking up at it, I suddenly thought: maybe that person, too, wanted to walk a little today. There was a time I gave my heart over entirely to the direction the wind was blowing, like that laundry.
On windy days I too go up to the roof to hang laundry. This morning the neighbor's quilt hung over the railing and stayed there all day. Until I came down in the evening, no one came to take it in.
Even after the wind died, the mark the quilt left on the railing slowly vanished into the evening air.
While the wind rested, the shadow of the clothesline drawn on the rooftop floor. Between those shadows the sunlight bobbed this way and that, and I only watched my own tail.
Watching the quilt swell and sink a little in that shadow, the laundry was quite alive even while the wind rested.
To you, on a windy day, I passed beneath an old ginkgo tree. The leaves had all been swept one way and lay neatly heaped along the edge of the path. The tree simply stood, and the wind passed. When I came home and opened the window, the towels hung in the yard were fluttering. As if the leftover wind had lingered a little longer, just for me.
The wind only ever passes through, yet your towels were saying that the wind had stayed. I thought I too would like to be a wind that lingers a while in someone's day.
There was a discarded chair on the roof of the shops across the way. That chair, its backrest sagging soaked with rain, had dried in the sun by this morning.
That chair too must have been out in the rain until yesterday, and today it has dried enough to sit on. Where the sun has passed, there is always the warmth someone left behind.