When I was growing up, we didn't have a clothes dryer. We had a clothesline. And, except for the worst of weather - rain, snow, sleet, and hail - when we used the indoor clothesline in the basement, the family's clothing, bedding, and towels was hung out to dry in the great outdoors.
Hanging up/bringing in the laundry was one of my regular chores, and it was one I really didn't mind all that much. Unlike dusting, dish-drying, and bathtub scouring, which I found completely dreadful and boring, outdoor chores, for the most part, stoked my fantasy furnace. Working outdoors - especially in the winter - let me be a war refugee in a DP camp. Noble me! Hanging out laundry for all those poor DP's. My war-torn, war-paralyzed family relying on me to earn a few pennies taking in laundry for rich people who could afford sheets while we slept on ticking mattresses stuffed with straw.
There were pro's and con's to laundry that was air dried. The biggest pro was the smell of the sheets. The biggest con was the stiff towels. And the stiff bras. My mother bought my sister and me the most uncomfortable cotton bras that in winter dried to the consistency of sandpaper. How comfy! It took about an hour's worth of wear before they softened up to something less than torture. When I got to college, I realized that there was such a thing as a bra made with nylon, which was actually soft to the touch, and which when dried did not resemble a slab of salt cod.
Of course, in light of today's concerns about energy use, the biggest pro to drying laundry outdoors is, of course, the energy savings associated with it.
Alas, in many places, there are laws forbidding clotheslines.
Some people, it seems, find unsightlies pretty, well, unsightly.
The clothesline controversy was aired recently in an article in The Boston Globe that noted that there are thousands of developments/homeowners' associations across the country that ban clotheslines in order to:
prevent flapping laundry from dragging down property values.
To end the tyranny of the anti-clothesline forces, legislators in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut are:
...seeking legislation that would guarantee the freedom to let one's garments flutter in the breeze.
(This is called "right to dry" legislation. In New Hampshire, it died in committee this session, but it will be on the agenda next year. Does this make New Hampshire the "Live Free or Dry State"?)
Maybe because I grew up in a densely populated, blue-collar area where the idea of equating hanging laundry with a decline in property values would have been as completely foreign as equating bathtub Madonna's with a decline in property values, I do not really understand why anyone would object to someone hanging their laundry out in their own back yard. But, apparently, there are some groups who put laundry in the same category as wheel-less junk cars propped up on cement blocks and left in the drive way with the license plates off. (Which any one would draw the line at. I mean, we have to protect our property values, don't we?)
"If you imagine driving into a community where the yards have clothes hanging all over the place, I think the aesthetics, the curb appeal, and probably the home values would be affected by that, because you can't let one homeowner do it and say no to the next," said Frank Rathbun, a spokesman for the Community Associations Institute, a national group based in Virginia that represents thousands of homeowner and condominium associations, many of which restrict clotheslines.
Well, Frank, maybe the folks in your neck of the woods do things differently than they did in Main South Worcester, but having a clothesline in your back yard is not exactly the same as having "clothes hanging all over the place." We are not talking third world, drying on bushes here. We're talking about clotheslines in the back yard - where they probably can't be seen by those worried about curb appeal.
Yet, subdivisions and condo complexes all over the place ban clotheslines. There are apparently a few town that do so, as well. (Can you imagine someone apprehended at the border with a couple of baskets full of wet laundry in their trunk? "Officer, honestly, I was just passing through. I have no intention of drying this laundry within the borders of Niceville.")
Alexander Lee, who is the director of Project Laundry List, which advocates for outdoor clothes drying, thinks he has a solution: an image makeover for it.
"We want Martha [Stewart] and Oprah [Winfrey] to make the clothesline into a pennant of eco-chic," he said, "instead of a flag of poverty."
I live in a small condo building, where there's very little place where we could actually have a clothesline. But I wouldn't mind seeing on go up in our little back "yard", which is little more than a cement walkway with a wrought iron table, a few chairs, and a couple of planters where I plunk down geraniums and petunias each summer.
In fact, I already use the great outdoors on occasion. If not for drying, exactly, I do tend to throw a drying rack out there in the fall and air out my sweaters after they've spent the summer in moth balls.
The smell of the great outdoors on your clothes.
Even in the middle of a big city, there's nothing quite like it.
3 comments:
One thing that people who grew up in New England (like both of us) sometimes don't realize is that in much of the country, suburbs are new, privately-planned developments with tons of rules like this. My hometown was a solidly middle-class mix of blue and white collar families, and the idea that you wouldn't be able to hand your clothes out was nuts - there was a clothesline running from the back of the house to a big pole as long as I can remember.
Of course, our neighbors up the street had rabbit coops. They'd lived there since the land was a farm (about 15-20 years before I was born) and while you couldn't add things like that, the original residents got to keep what they had. At the end of our street was a tiny farm (maybe an acre of two) where we'd buy corn in the summer. Again, the leftover of when the whole housing tract was the Nemergut family farm. It was kind of nice. (I believe it's now houses.)
As for property values, well, I'm imagining the conversation: "Honey, let's not look for a house in this neighborhood. The people here wear underwear."
People are really strange.
"The people wear underwear" - ROTFL! I'll definitely remember that line.
I grew up out in the middle of nowhere - Hobbs, NM...and while we had a dryer, we seldom if ever used it. We had a long three liner on t-poles in the backyard. I can remember standing between two of the lines breathing in the good clean scent of laundry and fresh air...(sunshine is also a great disinfectant, so at least that unsightly underwaar is semi-sterile!)
One of my friend who lives in an upscale development has a secret clothesline (shhh, we won't tell) where NOBODY can see it even if they happen to look over the fence.
I'm planning a collapsible line in my backyard - and luckily I live in a funky 'hood where people won't really care. So there.
Thanks for giving advice where to hang laundry. Using an outside line to spread out each garment seems to decrease the drying time.
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