Sunkissed Sheets

I'm watching my neighbour. Not in a creepy way. Maybe I shouldn't have inserted the word creepy into this, because it's anything but. I have jazz playing after all. What I'm admiring is their swinging sun-drying sheets. Precisely hung and pegged at meticulous intervals – their canary yellow linen has been left to leisurely sway in the breeze. It's so considered, yet free, like Stan Getz's saxophone. Immediately I play out the rest of their day in my mind…

Once dried to a gentle crunch, their neat folding (if their pegging is anything to go by) will imprint a clean crisp grid onto the sheets. The linen will then sigh gusts of cleansed air as they shake the duvet into the cover and again when they lay it softly to rest on top of their flat sheet. (There's definitely a flat sheet). In the evening, there are more sighs – this time of contentment – as they pull back the duvet and recline into plumped pillows. They read to extend the ecstasy: something by Amor Towles, or Tucci if they're more non-fiction. The UV-purification means their bed smells of almost nothing, a good 'nothing', apart from a whiff of eco-friendly detergent. They've left their phones on a living room charger, so they effortlessly drift into sleep. Deep, restful sleep. When we meet accidentally sometime later I know we'll gush over something like vine-ripened tomatoes or how pine cones make the best kindling.

Standing on my balcony (the watch tower), I swivel to survey my own unfastened sheets. Draped haphazardly over the metal railing, they flap and constantly threaten to take flight with each puff of wind. I reassure my fitted sheet by readjusting it for the fifth time. I'm still considering pegs, but I've made it four years without them and will probably only succumb when I lose my sky-blue duvet cover to my other downstairs neighbour's yard. The same one that caught my orange underwear a few weeks ago. Those are still down there – I check in on them each morning while clutching a mug of instant. It's much the same today, just a little busier. It's Sunday. It's sunny. It's Sunny Sheet-Washing Sunday.

Waking to bright blue skies this morning, the urge to pull at my bed's four corners to disrupt the shared laundry with a 7am cycle was immediate. Previously forced to drape damp sheets over a ground-floor-flat's lightless hallway, I now run at each clear Sunday with peg-less vigour. My sister, who lives elsewhere, is the same, except she uses pegs and judges me because I don't. She's even more particular than my Tucci neighbours. Her pillowcases are not hung half over the line, but instead pegged from their short edge, so they dry neat and flat as if ironed. Her upstairs neighbour on the other hand leaves theirs to bunch and desiccate on the line, pegless like me, but even wilder (their clothesline is rooted in a threatening base of grassless soil). We sometimes watch them fearfully from my sister's ground-floor living room as the sheets brave the rain and continue to fly defiantly out there into the week's end.

I preach like Sunday is the only day I wash sheets, but I'm really referring to any Sun-Day. Neighbours for entertainment is an optional bonus, however, jazz is not. I like to think Nat King Cole is as good at removing bad bacteria as the sun is, but I don't want to spread rumours. It's just something I dreamed up while hanging sheets last Sun-Day.