I was delighted recently as I walked through the neighborhood to see clothes flapping in the backyard of a young couple with children. The wind was chilly; I could almost feel the scratchy texture of the big towels nearly dry at day’s end. And the scent, fresh, cold, the perfect pitch of fragrance impossible to replicate. You don’t know when laundry day is for most of us these days, unless you see the blow of dryer air behind the fence.

Like most girls of my time, I learned about laundry at my mother’s heels, handing her the clothespins. We first only had the push type with the tiny round head. I don’t remember how it happened, but the clothespin with the spring appeared, finally replacing those early versions. Mom liked the spring-loaded ones a lot, she told me. “They don’t slip as much in a big wind.”

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Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist who has studied the mysterious ways of the brain and their effects on individuals in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings (later made into a movie staring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro), has a new book, Musicophilia.

He explores his own fascination with music, how the brain makes and understands music, and, of course, the aberrations that can occur in the brain involving music.

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