I have a checkered history with clotheslines. In this day and
age, a lot of Homeowners' Associations ban them as a "blight" on the pristeen
beauty of their little housing developments. Other people couldn't live without
them.
When I was growing up, we had a small concrete back yard where my
sister and I would play hopscotch and ride tricycles. On wash day, my mother
comandeered the yard to hang the laundry. There were about four or five lines that
ran from the wall of our flat to the wall of the flat across the yard (where my aunt
lived). I remember bringing in the laundry, when I was old enough to reach the
clothespins, everything stiff as a board (my mother would iron softness into them) but
smelling fresh.
When Walt and I moved into our first house, a rented place in Albany,
CA (next door to Berkeley), we had one toddler and I was expected Ned. When Ned was
born, we had two in diapers and no dryer. Walt built a clothesline right outside our
bedroom window. We also got a dog. Ho Chi Mutt. Mutt delighted in
following me around while I pinned clothes on to the clothesline and then before I could
get back in the house, he would have torn them all off. I remember on about the
third day that we had the damn dog, I called Walt in tears sobbing that we had to take
this dog that I had longed for my entire life back to the pound because I simply couldn't
handle him.
(I never did handle him, but we ended up getting a dryer to
put in the basement because there was no room in the house for one).
So from the time Mutt came into our lives, we had a dryer. Once
in awhile I would hang something outside, but I really preferred the soft fluffy feel of
clothes just out of the dryer to the stiff, fresh-smelling line-dried clothes.
When we visited Walt’s cousin in Ireland, she had a clothesline.
Drying clothes in Ireland is a real art, because you have to know how soon to put them
out, gauging how long it is before the next rain comes. If the clothes don’t get all
the way dry, then you hang them over chairs, near the heaters, to continue the drying
process.
In 2000, Peggy came to visit for 6 weeks. After she’d been
here for a couple of days, she said she wanted to rinse out a few things and asked
"Where’s your clothesline?" She was amazed when I told her I didn’t
have one.
"No clothesline," I responded.
I explained that I do everything in the dryer. She talked about how she preferred to hang clothes on a line, but eventually agreed to toss some things in the dryer. She ended up going out, buying rope and clothespins and stringing a line across our back yard. She was now happy as a clam and the line hung there for about 10 years, until it finally wore out (not, I assure you, from use, though I did use it once in awhile)
When I went to Australia, I got to see Peggy's clothes line, on which she
hung everything. It was particularly fun on the day when she washed all the dogs'
toys (unlike me, she had dogs who actually played with stuffed animals instead of
who had a personal need to tear a stuffed toy apart as quickly as possible. I think
I've had toys that may have lasted 10 minutes (if they were very sturdy) with our
dogs.She did not own a dryer, so if I wanted my clothes to be clean and dry, I had to get used to using a clothesline, which I did.
I did get used to hanging clothes and even came to enjoy the
fresh-smelling clothes that I took down after they were dry.
However, when I returned to the land of e pluribus unum, I
was just as glad to go back to fluffing my clothes in an electronic machine.
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1 comment:
I've never discovered any mystique in clothes hung on the line. They're stiff, full of pollen, bird droppings, insects, etc. I never thought they had any smell. To say nothing of the effort involved. The day we got a dryer was a huge day in my life and, unless there was no other option, I've never hung anything on a clothesline since. (I feel the same way about irons. LOL)
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