The Dust Storm and the Clothesline
A brown wall rolled over our farm on wash day, and my wife's whole line of white sheets came back from the storm a perfect tan.
My wife Marlene hangs her wash out on a line, even in a county where the dust can come up on you without a word of warning. She says a dryer takes the soul out of a sheet. I used to argue. I do not argue anymore, because of the Tuesday in April I am going to describe, when the forecast on the radio said light winds and sunshine, and the radio man was lying to us in the most pleasant voice.
Around two in the afternoon, the sky to the west turned the color of a grocery sack. We could see it coming across the wheat for twenty minutes, a rolling brown curtain that made the cattle stop and look. Marlene ran out to take the sheets down, but she was too late by exactly one minute. The wall hit the yard and the line, and for about ten minutes you could not see your own hand, much less a bedspread.
When it passed, and it passed as sudden as it came, the sun came out like nothing had happened. Marlene walked to the line with her hands on her hips. Eleven white sheets, six pillowcases, and a tablecloth she was saving for Easter, all of them now the exact shade of a manila folder. She stood there in silence, and I kept very still, the way you do around a mama cow. Then she started laughing, and I breathed again.
She took them down, and she washed them, and they came out white, which I thought settled things. But the next week she hung out another load, and the sky stayed clear, and the whole line dried a beautiful tan anyway, because the dust was already in the air. She decided it was a feature. She sells them now as farmhouse linen, at a craft fair in Ponca City, and she tells people the color is hand-dyed with Oklahoma topsoil, which, I would point out, is true. The NOAA folks say we should expect more of these days, so she is planning ahead and buying extra pillowcases. A cowboy poet over at farm.FM even wrote a verse about the tan sheets.