When I bought this house there was a ginormous clothesline out in the backyard. The clotheslines of Livingston are somewhat famous with handymen around town — most of them were made of enormous plumbers pipe and set into three or four feet of concrete. With the winds we have here, you need a sturdy clothesline, especially if, in the case of the family I bought this house from, you have 8 children.

Needless to say, I had that clothesline cut down when I was renovating. It was in a terrible spot in the backyard and everyone who came over for a barbecue bumped their heads on it. But I missed having a clothesline. It seemed ridicuous to be running the dryer when it’s 80 degrees with 15% humidity outside.

I bought this one from Clotheslineshop.com. It’s called the Versaline. It was kind of expensive. Actually, it was really expensive, but I wanted a clothesline that I could take down, and one that would fit in this unused space in my side yard. This is the perfect place for a clothesline — it’s out of foot traffic and really close to my back door (which goes to the basement where the washing machine is). One of the things I’ve discovered with retro-technologies is that if they aren’t convenient, I won’t use them. Riding my bike around town is easy and fun and saves me gas, so I do it. A clothesline where it isn’t a pain to use means I’ll use it.  I have to say, this was expensive, but I’m really impressed — it’s quite sturdy, well-designed, and works exactly as promised. I’m thrilled. I’m resisting the urge to wash perfectly clean clothes just to hang them on the line!

Big excitement here in a small town — the bridge to the 9th street Island is collapsing. It’s not a surprise — the surprise is that it hasn’t fallen down before now. The river has been high since just after Mother’s Day, and it really went up these last few days of warm weather. It was Thursday afternoon that the sag became noticeable, and they evacuated some folks, then closed the bridge entirely. Yesterday they took off anyone who wanted to go in a helicopter, and the DOT has arrived with a Bailey Bridge they’re planning to put in, but that will take a week or so. So yesterday afternoon and evening we all hung out, watching the bridge. It wasn’t very dramatic, but it was fun in that way that non-disastrous catastrophes can be — you’d run into people you hadn’t seen in a while, chat, watch the bridge, watch the guys with the big equipment, dogs would run around, little kids chased one another. And even the folks on the other side, they’re inconvenienced, but it’s not a disaster — their houses are okay, the island isn’t flooding, and the folks who decided to stay are watching out for everyone else’s animals and report that they’re actually enjoying the peace and quiet.

Okay, I admit it, it was one of those weekends that make you really a little crazy as a single chick. I finally jumped back in the internet-dating pool and had a Really Fun Date last week. I met him at a bar in town where I know the bartender, and one of my bestest guy friends was at the bar when I walked in (and then came over to introduce himself and sort of loom in a very older-brother kind of way that I found endearing). We had fun. We chatted. We flirted. There was touching and knee knocks and then we went for some dinner. There was kissing on the sidewalk. A date was made for Saturday night.

And then he stood me up.

By email.

With an excuse that would have been legit if I’d ever heard from him again, but as I haven’t, well …

In retrospect, there were red flags. My guy friend tells me the RFD (Really Fun Date) had come into the bar early, ordered a drink and then had gone over to lurk in a corner before I came in. Like he was checking me out. Like he was going to bail if I didn’t meet some unknown criteria. My friend the bartender seemed decidedly grumpy about the date (and as he’s been a pro bartender for a long time, there’s a reason we meet people in his bar).  And then there’s the fact that he didn’t tell me his last name until I asked on email afterwards, and never would give me his phone number. And although the slightly-aggressive kissing was flattering at the time, when combined with Saturday night plans that elicited the comment from my dearest friend in Tucson: “Isn’t that what the kids these days refer to as a ‘booty call’?” well, like I said, red flags.

And so, it was a disapointing weekend.

However, as I sit here in the Backyard of Gorgeousness, with cedar waxwings and western tanagers and sparrows in my apple trees and Ray-the-dog curled up beside me on the couch and a wee fire in my firepit, I have to say — after all those years in the wilderness, after all those years renting crappy apartments and hoping for fellowships in graduate school and being broke and not knowing what was going to happen next — I look out over my garden, from which I ate a delicious dinner of sauteed Senza Testa greens with  homemade pancetta; I look out at the gorgeous thunderheads shot through with that western light we call “God beams,” and really, despite all the difficulties of the past few years, I feel pretty lucky.

I have a good job. I have a house I bought myself with my own money and that slowly, bit by bit, I’m fixing up. I have a garden and two great dogs. I live in the kind of town where even when I go to meet a guy at a bar who turns out to be a snake, there are people who make sure to point out to him that I live here, that there are people looking out for me (and my sweet fraternal friend called that night to make sure I’d gotten home okay). I have a firepit, and a lovely yard and a Coleman lantern hanging from the branch of an apple tree by which I can reread Siri Hustvedt’s terrific novel What I Loved and a table in the backyard where I can eat my lovely dinner and write this post and four terrific girls, my pretend children, who will be back from LA for the summer next week and a whole town full of nice people who love me.

It would have been fun if the RFD had worked out, but well, looking at the glorious thunderheads lit up in the late-evening light — it’s hard to be too upset about it.

I said it four years ago, and I’ll say it again today — as a progressive straight person, I’m beyond proud that my former home state of California has led the way and realized that gender shouldn’t have anything to do with the ability to love someone nor with the drive to build a family and a home.

In memory of my uncle Jack, who lived with Geoffrey for 25 years, in memory of my friend Michael who died too young of AIDS, in memory of my great-great Aunt Marie, “The Duchess” who lived in a Boston Marriage with her cousin and ran a settlement house in Chicago and in memory of her brother “The Colonel” who my grandmother claims never married because of his terrible psoriasis (but who I suspect, from having seen the photos of him as a dashing officer supervising the invasion of Italy during WWII was single for a different reason), for my dear beloved ex-boyfriend Johnny, who I knew played for the other team long before he did and who has spent the past 15 years with his boyfriend Michael, for all my other beloved gay friends and relatives — congratulations, Mazel Tov, may blessings rain down upon your heads.

In the words of the Supreme Court of the State of California:

As discussed below, upon review of the numerous California decisions that have examined the underlying bases and significance of the constitutional right to marry (and that illuminate why this right has been recognized as one of the basic, inalienable civil rights guaranteed to an individual by the California Constitution), we conclude that, under this state’s Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.

As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own — and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family —
constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society. Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights. We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples

For all of us who have longed for a vision and model of marriage that is less constrained by traditional gender roles, for all of us who have longed for a vision of loving partnership that is progressive and not dependent on old, outmoded visions, whatever our sexual orientation, this is a joyous day. Congratulations everyone!