Now I’m going to reveal something that I have confided in only a few people:   my passion for laundry.   Not just mine, everybody’s.  It’s more than a mere passion, it’s more like a  fixation, really.   A mania.

Clotheslines, fluttering with their victorious domestic banners, are like daily bulletins, footnotes in the ongoing family story.   Plenty of people walk around Venice snapping pictures of laundry, I suppose because by now it’s something you don’t see very often back home.   I can tell you that when I see people photographing my laundry, it annoys me.   I don’t regard it or myself as either quaint or picturesque.

 But why do I love it so much, in my own secret connoisseur’s heart?   It’s not the laundry itself, but the drying thereof, because that is the linchpin of the entire domestic enterprise.   Not having a clothes dryer (I only know one person here who has one, and she uses it about twice a year, in the winter), you develop, quickly or slowly, a sense about the weather and its capacity to dry your garments that you’d never have imagined possessing   in more appliance-laden towns.   It’s a jungle-lore sort of skill.

This week is a case in point.  We have been having a stretch of dream weather: breezy, sunny, dry, cloudless.   It’s weather which inspires rational people — and there are more of them than I imagined, judging by the  troop  transports  which are the overloaded vaporettos heading to the Lido  — as I say, rational people to obey the   seductive call,  “Beeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaach.”

But I, and I think I’m not alone, look out the window and think “Laundry!!!”   Because with this perfect concatenation of elements you feel invincible, capable of drying anything, and by the look of the clotheslines around this part of the neighborhood this weather inspires a sort of primal instinct (cue the voice of David Attenborough), an irresistible urge to wash heavy cotton terrycloth bathrobes, double-bed-size comforters, vast thick beach towels, all sorts of blankets.   Mattress covers.   Sweatshirts (Go Big Red!).   Many pairs of jeans.

 If you have ever  tried to dry anything on a winter day of chilly fog, or even those few days when it’s so cold your underwear literally freezes solid (I did not make that up),    you don’t need to be reading this, because you know.   Also, I think laundry is beautiful.  

So what happens is that I am not only in love with the texture and fragrance of the socks and T-shirts as I gather them in (is that really what sunshine smells like?), I can’t resist looking at other women’s laundry.   How’s it going?   What time did she start the washing machine to have it out already at this hour?   How can one family have so many black undergarments?   This is an irrefutable sign of going bush.

Speaking of mysteries, there was a person living in the top floor corner apartment on the west side of Campazzo San Sebastian who every day hung out a man’s medium-blue dress shirt.   I became fascinated with this, not because it was happening but why.   Does he have only one?   And more to the point, where is the rest of his garb?   In ten years I never saw any other item of clothing, for man, woman, or beast, hanging out there over the street.   It almost reached the point where I was ready to ring his doorbell to find out.   But then I realized that I was enjoying  wondering  more than I would knowing.

My friend, Cristina, who has the clothes dryer, told me this: When she and her husband and twins moved into their new apartment in a very unprocessed part of Dorsoduro called Santa Marta, she accepted that as newcomers they would be under round-the-clock surveillance by the other women in the neighborhood.   Everybody pretends nothing is going on, but they  see everything.  

She  already knew that a certain type of housewife — I use the term not in a sociological but technical  sense, because here housewifery still a respected full-time occupation,  as respected as being an airplane mechanic — cadres of such women inspect  the hung-out laundry with  a  terrific list of parameters.   They draw numerous conclusions about you, your mother, your ancestors,  how many languages you speak, whether you’ve ever read Proust, not so much according to what you hang out to dry (there’s only so many items a family uses) but how you do it.  

Socks hung out at random?   Say, colors not matching, or thrown in with the briefs or bras?   Bad.   Do you hang your husband/son/uncle’s  shirt out by the hem, or by the shoulder?   (Ditto any kind of trouser — there are two distinct schools of thought on  whether hanging them by the waistband or the leg-hems is more effective, aesthetically pleasing, appropriate, etc.   Pantyhose also falls in this category.)   Matching items grouped together in perfect sequence are what you want to aim for, as they bespeak scrupulosity, forethought, and a commitment to doing things the Right Way.   (I am not making this up.)

But Cristina happened to be  using her dryer in  those early days  and therefore not hanging out any laundry at all.   The neighbor women couldn’t stand it.  Eventually one of them stopped her on the street and asked her, point-blank, where her laundry was.   “I don’t know what they were thinking,” she told me, “like maybe we never washed….”  

All you need is sun, at least for a little while (we get it in our courtyard for approximately an hour), no humidity, and a certain kind of breeze — not so strong (though of course it’s gratifying to watch your laundry thrashing around outside), but steady.   Today it’s perfect, a sturdy, efficient little zephyr that has  kept going all day.   I feel such a sense of triumph when I bring in the heavy stuff, all dry, that I have to remind myself that I get absolutely no credit for either  the sun or the wind.

Daily trivia: The common word here for laundry is bucato.   This literally means “holed,” as in, having holes in it.   Not holes that it came with, holes that were caused by countless washings, which until not so long ago was still accomplished with a washboard and tub.  

More trivia:   The washboard was the perfect tool by which to teach your kid how to swim.   Generations of Venetian children learned how to swim by hanging onto their mother’s washboard.  

So all those people photographing laundry on the line might as well be photographing Neolithic rock art.   They know what it looks like, but they have no idea what it means.  

I am convinced that when the Last Trump blows on Judgment Day, there will be at least one woman in the world who is too busy hanging out socks to even hear it.

One of the things I love about our neighborhood is that there are children here.   Lots and lots of them, of every size and attitude.   Shoals of them, migrating herds of them, like the wildebeest on the Serengeti.  

If you walk down Via Garibaldi at around 6 on a summer evening, you will realize that this is one corner of Italy in which the word “birthrate” isn’t associated with “falling.”

But  an unusually perceptive person would already have known all  that from the scene  I noticed  outside one of the tobacco/candy/lottery ticket/toy stores  here.

What these three alarmingly pink doll-size strollers  reveal is:

• That there are little girls living nearby.  
• That there are lots of them, enough  to create an important market for toys, especially those  designed for  little girls, a market that requires  serious  inventory.
• That  they are extremely demanding customers, who require choice in the products they insist their relatives buy them, whichever relative has recently shown a weak spot that can be exploited.
• That  any color is good, as long as it’s  pink.  

I hope I’m here when they grow up, I really want to see how they dress.

Lino told me something that happened on the vaporetto yesterday which falls into my personal category of events I term “Venetian moments.”   Actually, they could more generally be called “small-town moments,” but we’re here and besides, I still sometimes marvel at how many connections form the web that hold this city together.   Kind of like a truss.

Venetian moments either need to involve a Venetian, or occur in Venice.   They can happen to foreigners but only after they’ve been here for a while.   And of course they’re usually fleeting little experiences (sometimes only glimpses, not even verbal).   I love it when they happen to me and I think that Lino was secretly pleased about this one, though he didn’t make a big thing out of it.

So he was on the #1 vaporetto, the trusty local, headed uptown, and a little old couple got on at the stop nearest a nursing home called the Ca’ di Dio.   He glances at them out of the corner of his eye, like you do on public transportation.  

Then the little old lady addresses him in a tiny, bent-over voice:

“Lu no xe da la parochia dei Carmini?”   (“Aren’t you from the parish of the Carmini?”)   They continued in Venetian, but I’ll spare you and keep the thing going.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Because I’m from the Carmini too,” she continued.  

“I’m Leda’s little brother,” he said.    He didn’t need to bother adding a last name, or a street name, or any other clue.   And putting it this way meant that he already knew that in her day (when he was a tyke) there was only one Leda in the parish.

“I thought I recognized you,” she said.  

They exchanged a few little generic comments, and  then he got off.  

It isn’t surprising is that she recognized him; parishes were very tightly knit and usually were composed of   plenty of large families.   And people of her vintage  have phenomenal memories for faces and names — they’re like anonymous little griots wandering through the supermarket, comparing the cost of tuna while  brimming with memories of people, events, places, who knew/did/said what and where and also why.   And with whom.   Stretching back unto the fourth and fifth generation.   They’re completely overgrown with the shrubbery of family histories, each one of which is a complete saga.  

When neighborhoods were still intact, these little old ladies were plentiful, and they weren’t usually endearing — they were to be feared and placated with offerings because they knew everything about you.   They knew things about you that literally nobody knew, nobody could know.   Things not even you knew about yourself.   This amount of knowledge and diabolical skill at using it is one of those primal forces, like the atom, capable of life or death.   Or, as Lino puts it whenever he might be tempted to drift into something like nostalgia for the old days, “Those little old ladies knew how many hairs you had on your ass.”  

In this case, it didn’t matter that he’s now 71 and probably hasn’t been seen by her since he was 22 and moved to another neighborhood — he was imprinted on her memory and will be there for eternity.  

Speaking of eternity, don’t think that this knowledge will disappear when she dies; she’s going to take it with her so she can find her friends up there and sit around all afternoon talking about people who aren’t there to defend themselves.   It’s true that they acted as a steady underpinning to the life in the courtyard, a sort of 24-hour neighborhood watch.   But as Lino also says, “Their gossip destroyed whole families,” and he’s not joking.

The bow that tied up this moment was the fact that he remembered her too, though by name,  instead of  face.    “She’s gotten really old,” he remarked.   Still, they were landsmen, that’s the point of it all.  

If there were a code word or a secret handshake for the people of the Carmini, they’d have used it.   He was struck by the fact that she identified herself according to  parish, in the old way.    Back then, people didn’t identify themselves so much according to their sestiere, or district, the way they do now since everything’s gotten all stretched out of shape.     They went by parish.   If somebody asked where you lived, you’d say “I’m from the Carmini,”   or “Anzolo Rafael,” or “San Cassan.”   That’s the way it was.

End of moment.