Running Naked Screaming Down the Street!: Washing and Drying and Stuff

Monday, June 11, 2018

Washing and Drying and Stuff

Just in case you missed it this year, April 19 was National Hanging Out Day. If you thought about celebrating it, I’ll bet you thought it was the day to get together with your buddies and just “hang”.

Nope. It is a day reserved to encourage people to learn about the benefits of using a clothesline for drying laundry. Did you know?? That according to “experts that study these things” electric clothes dryers account for 6 to 10 percent of energy consumption. Hanging out clothes (1) Is good for the environment; (2) Saves you money; (3) Therapeutic because you are outdoors in the fresh air.

To be completely honest, hanging clothes outside is something I had never done (after all, I grew up in a time then washers and dryers were the norm). In fact, until we moved to the country house in Wharton, I’d never owned a house that had a clothesline. And, then I didn’t use it for clothes until one day when the dryer died.

So, just a few observations

Hanging clothes on a line isn’t bad. Doesn’t take too long and as long as you start in the early AM, it’s not too hot out there.

Those authors that write about the wonderfulness of sun and breeze dried clothes, towels, sheets – how fresh and soft they are – don’t live here in the humid part of the universe.

Letting sheets dry on a clothesline is ok. They are fresh and dry pretty nicely, abet wrinkled. (Clotheslines, you know, were used daily in the world when everything was ironed, something I never learned how to do and besides why iron sheets – they’re just going to get wrinkled when you go to bed).

Anything else dries like a board – towels are almost impossible to fold and clothes are itchy.

And speaking of washers and dryers. I’ve never used or had anything other than a normal washer/dryer set.

However, when I was very young, my aunt who lived in East Texas, had one of the wringer types. I remember she would roll it outside to the back porch and run it there. It was fun to help her catch the wrung-out clothes after they were fed through the wringers. Afterwards, they would be hung on a clothesline to dry. I don’t think she thought it was as much fun. I remember when she got a washer/dryer set (probably in the early 1960s) she was much happier.