Three Sheets To The Wind

Only they are not. They are damp, folded on top of the washing machine, ready to chance their luck tomorrow.

It is the rainy season, which calls for method with heavy items of laundry. Washing machine overnight, ready to go out on the line the minute the sun beats off the morning mists, and bob’s your uncle. Sheets dry and back in the press in the afternoon as the clouds gather above.

Except for the intervention of fate. It is reckoned that the sound of a vomiting dog could rouse the hardiest of the Seven Sleepers and this morning, while breakfasting, I heard the dire sounds coming from the bedroom. My knees might not be what they once were but I reckon I could have given Hussein Bolt a run for his money over the twelve metres from table to bedside, though all in vain.

Plush had been faster, though not so fast as to escape, hide and blame it on Napoleon – the usual culprit. The sheets, top, bottom and undersheet, had to be whipped off the bed and hurled into the wash.

Where is the problem, you ask? The problem was that I had changed the bedding the night before, and it was last night’s bedding which occupied the washing line.

At one time I had extensive washing lines in the garden where bedding could blow high wide and handsome but gradually the garden has encroached on them and they are currently occupied by the maracuya vines – passion fruit – so valuable for cool drinks, jams and desserts.

While a chayote vine would have swiftly met its Waterloo the maracuya can invade wherever it likes. so those washing lines are lost to me, leaving only the line under cover on the balcony.

These linen sheets are heavy, two pieces joined up the middle as the cloth was woven on narrow home looms. We bought them in France – stacks of them – at vide greniers, brocantes – some embroidered with the initials of the bride to be, others with ladder edgings – no longer wanted in an age when the housewife could sling cotton polyester sheets in the dryer to be ready in minutes.

These were the sheets that my neighbour in France, Edith, would be washing in the spring at the back of her farm…beating the dirt out on the stones, leaving them to dry on the rosemary bushes in the sun to give them that ivory colour which we prized. So often, the professional sellers had treated them with bleach to obtain the sparkling white which denoted a short life for what they were selling.

Why do we want heavy sheets in Costa Rica? It is, after all, warm!

Go back to childhood. We were both brought up in houses without heat in the bedrooms, except in case of illness. I remember having scarlet fever with blankets blocking the window and the bed surrounded with disinfectant soaked sheets , while a coal fire burned in the grate night and day, but apart from that the windows in winter were patterned with frost on the inside and we went to sleep under old Army blankets made from what was appropriately known as ‘shoddy’- a fabric made from recycled wool -, they were not warm, but they were heavy.

Accordingly, neither of us can sleep unless the top sheets are heavy…we can always throw them off, but they have to be there to induce slumber – and they take a bit of drying.

We have known other sheets in our time…the hospedaje in Granada, Nicaragua – before foreigners took over the town – where our en suite shower was surrounded by plastic roof sheeting and the bed sheets were pure polyester. We spent the night turning over on the glossy surface and crashing to the floor while Leo slapped the tribes of mozzies keen to feed on foreign flesh. After a night of thuds and slaps he was greeted as a sexual superman in the morning with men standing him brandies.

I must get these sheets out tomorrow, they are in the way…… I remember my father returning home in winter to see laundry drying on clothes horses before the fire and stating ‘this is like the slums of Naples’ though how he related clothes hanging on lines across the streets in bright sunshine to the steaming racks in front of the fire in a dreich winter evening is beyond me.

Most foreigners here have dryers…..but not for me. Even in the rainy season there is enough of a breeze – rising to a howling gale – to dry even these sheets under the cover of the balcony if you catch the morning hours and there is nothing like the scent of fresh linen dried outdoors.

Time now for a gin and tonic…..but only one or otherwise I too shall be three sheets to the wind.