Blue peg

Sometimes you can find points of wonder in very mundane objects.

My laundry pegs live in a bag, and I bring out the bag whenever I’m hanging laundry outside. It’s been a long time since I bought any new pegs and I was pretty sure I knew all the pegs.

There are the older, narrow cream ones that have a good grip on the line. I like these ones but there are not a lot of them, so you have to hunt through the bag to find them.

There are the big Ikea ones that are mainly white (although there are a few coloured ones that are older and approaching the end of their useful life). These ones don’t hold so well onto the line, and when I peg things out, they don’t stay where I pegged them, and the clothes end up bunched up because the pegs slide down the line.

There are the three legged ones in yellow and blue. There were the kind of pegs I used to play with in my childhood. I would take one red, one yellow, one green and one blue peg and create adventures for these four ‘peg people’. (Usually paired off in couples – red and green, and blue and yellow.) They might get lost in quicksand (a mud puddle). They might be lost in the jungle (the garden). But quite often there would be a fight on top of a volcano (the chimney of our barbecue) and someone would fall to their death.

Looking back, I wonder how many perfectly good pegs I buried in the garden or disposed of down the barbecue chimney over the years?

These days I see these pegs as the most grippy of all the pegs in the peg bag. They’re my favourite for pegging out sheets.

Sometimes if I find one in my pocket I might leave it standing up on its legs in the kitchen bench. My husband asked me not to do this, he finds it disturbing.

The other day I pulled a peg out of the bag and I was surprised. It was the same shape as the older, narrow cream ones, but it was dark blue. I hadn’t seen this peg before.

In truth I must have seen it once, back when I bought it, but I hadn’t seen it for a long time. Years, perhaps. It had worked its way down to the bottom of the bag where it had avoided my hand reaching down for it.

Until the other day, when I found it in my hand.

And so in the middle of the very mundane task of hanging out the laundry, I found a small point of wonder.

In a blue peg.