We have cheated a couple of times, borrowing a friend’s dryer for a down jacket and availing of my mother-in-laws capacious laundry room over Christmas, luxuriating in the easy life. But by and large, we are simply living with laundry constantly hanging in the living room, and crunchy towels. We even rearranged the sofa so we could get the rack closer to the radiator, which cuts drying time to only a day.
Our first power bill made me gasp: €780, and it wasn’t even winter yet. We understood why everyone else hung out laundry, even on cool, moist days. A dryer would simply be an unaffordable luxury, one that could easily double a power bill. And so, we see peach-colored sheets and long nightdresses along the N81 just past Silverhill on all but the soggiest days, and compare the virtues of various folding racks with our neighbors.
Our three-week visit to the US has coincided with an amazing stretch of fine weather, which I hope to not jinx by mentioning. As our folding line gets a workout, our Swedish dryer sits unused as of yet, and we depart for the old country again in a few days. A fellow mom at the school has just convinced her husband to put up a clothesline in their side yard, and has been asking advice about hanging laundry: How many clothespins do I need? (More than a single pack of 50 for a family of four!) What is the protocol for hanging underwear? (On the inside of the rack, where nosy neighbors won’t see your shy tween’s smalls or your unmentionables) When do you need to bring it in? (Only if it is pouring, since wind will evaporate light moisture quickly.) Another mom overhears us chatting, and says, “Oh, I miss how line-dried sheets smell. Maybe we should put up a line too!”
How funny that something as simple as hanging up laundry, a task that our grandmothers saw as a chore (this woman’s thoroughly modern suburban mom had a dryer), has become something we must learn. And how odd that these college-educated women—and men—have bought into laundry additives, and scented dryer sheets and asthmatic children to make their laundry smell good, when the sun is there for free. How ironic that we are having to relearn something as simple as how putting the clothespin on only one side of the sock makes it dry more quickly. But how delicious to rediscover the quiet meditative quality of hanging laundry on a cool morning, listening to exuberant birdsong while we plan our day in our minds. And how lovely it is to snuggle into sheets that smell like sunshine and takes us to pleasant dreamscapes. Like crafts of old, the wisdom of the generation was nearly lost. Nearly.
sigh. My grandmother taught me to love line-dried laundry. One of my favorite thing-a-ma-jigs is a little clothes pin sack I have to hang on the line. It holds my pins so nicely, but even better -- it has beautiful embroidery on it of bluebirds hanging out cloths on a line. Positively lovely.
ReplyDeleteMy mother-in-law has little bags that look like apron-y dresses to hold the pegs, as she calls them; me, I'm lazy, and just leave the pins on the line, stealing from where they seem to congregate in the sags.
ReplyDeletePeople think we're nuts to forego technology, but they've clearly never slept in sheets that smell like sunshine!