Hangin' Green

One of my chores when I was a little girl living in Montana was to hang clothes on the line to dry. We had no dryer, and, with relative humidities rarely out of the single digits and breezes rarely into the single digits, why would you need one? At any rate, it was a chore I used to enjoy or at least with the advantages of hindsight I remember enjoying it.

So when our dryer started showing signs of its age a few years ago I decided to help it out by getting sun and wind to do some of the work for it. We don't have the kind of winds here that soften clothes significantly on the line, so I toss stuff in the dryer for the last bit of fluffing up. And my delicate sensibilities (!) lead me not to display underwear that looks like underwear on the line (sports bras and boxers are okay, though).

Here's an assortment of stuff getting dried for free last weekend.

Even though I'm not a total eco-dryer, I feel like I'm saving some energy and some money by using my little line. Which is strung between the back porch and a very sad-looking basketball goal that really needs to go away. When that eventually happens I'll extend the line all the way to the garage and might actually have plenty of space on sheet-washing days. I hear you can go much more high-tech and fancy with your clothesline, but my very primitive model works fine for the small amount of laundry generated by empty-nesters.

I find it enormously satisfying to do this from an environmental standpoint, but I probably wouldn't do it as regularly if the managing of the laundry on the line wasn't a bit therapeutic and soothing in itself. I guess I'm old enough to revel in a little second-childhood activity now and then.