Line Drying

When we bought our house, it came with a washer and dryer. The washer was avocado green, from the mid-seventies. The dryer looked like something from 1959. It last for four years and a part burned out. Mark replaced the part, it burnt out again, and we called in the repairmen. It’s gone, they told us.  We gave in and hung the clothes outside all summer. It was not a trial.

The next winter, we considered our options. Buy a new dryer, which was not cheap nor was it energy efficient. Or we could hang the clothes in the basement for free. We hung. After a few years of slow drying in a wet basement, we bought a couple of big, sturdy drying racks and moved the process upstairs. Then I took the dowels from the old rack, laid then across the rafters in what is now the dining room, and hung pants and heavy shirts there, over the woodstove. Our weekly laundry air dries, spread around the house, in about 36 hours.

Sheets and towels are a different story. They pile up in the basement, waiting for a dry spell—we usually get one or two a winter. Some years, the sun breaks never come…so Mark loads up all of the sheets, towels, fleece jackets, and bathrobes into his big duffle bag and hauls them down the street. He spends a couple of hours reading, washing, and drying all of the big laundry in the old-fashioned Laundromat with the murals of rivers and waterfalls above the machines. He enjoys the orderliness of the process and the feeling of accomplishment. Even with the occasional trip to the Laundromat, we are happy with our system.

  We had a bright, cold spell this weekend, so I pushed all of the sheets through n Sunday morning and hung them outside just as the fog broke. They were half dry by night, so I left them on the line until I came home from work this afternoon. They smell great and we are good for another month and a half.  Spring will come before the pile overtakes us again.