Yesterday was what I sometimes call a “non-day.” That is, nothing eventful happened. I marched through my daily tasks: have tea, scrape the cat litter, journal, do a blog post, go out for a walk, work on my writing, make a sketch, play NYT word games, read a book, listen to a podcast, and stretch. I folded a load of laundry, put away the dishes from the dishwasher, and ran an errand.

It’s March and the days are longer, so this all feels productive and interesting right now. In the midwinter, even when I get everything done, I feel as if I am simply occupying time until I can take a nap or go to bed and force another day to pass.

The errand I ran was to go in search of a clothesline. I already have clotheslines in my basement, and I hang my wash there, but it occurred to me the other day that I could hang my clothes on my empty third floor instead. The washer (and the dryer I don’t use) are on the second floor, and that would mean I was carrying a basket of clothes up and down one flight of stairs instead of two. That’s the sensible reason. The less sensible reason is that I don’t like my basement. It’s dry (and, since I got my shop vac, not too dusty) and the clothes smell good when I hang them down there, but it is still an underground crypt that is a proxy for the less pleasant aspects of my subconscious mind. The less time I spend down there, the better.

But nobody had clothesline.

Oh, the hardware store had those retractable ones, which involve a thin cord coming out of a spring-loaded reel. I tried one of those. It broke pretty rapidly. No, I just wanted some plain old cotton cord. The Target didn’t have clothesline either. Neither did the Giant, which has taken to putting over-the-counter drugs, makeup, and laundry supplies inside a guarded mini-store in the middle of the store to deter shoplifting.

I came home defeated, and ordered a nice length of cotton clothesline from Amazon. It will come Sunday, having been plucked off a shelf by a worker, thrown in some kind of packaging, shipped on a truck, and filed in the jammed shelves at the Amazon counter in my local Whole Foods. It’s complicated trying to live the simple life these days.