I made passing mention
of my newly purchased clothesline way back in 2020, promising a whole
post about it that was very long in coming. But now it's here! You
finally get to learn how a simple string brought joy into my life.
During
the lockdowns of 2020, I spent a lot of time obsessing about dog fur.
It was all over every surface of my home and every article of my
clothes. When I took to the Internet in an effort to find something that
would actually remove the fur and that wasn't a lint roller
(single-use sticky plastic sheets? Not eco-friendly at all!), I came across
someone's claim that hanging clothes out on a line was a surefire way to
get the fur off them. Maybe it had something to do with all the
flapping in the breeze, I assumed, but I didn't think about it too much.
That
was just the final push I needed to get me to buy a clothesline,
something I'd been considering for a while. I'd never been happy about
using a hot air dryer—it's damaging to fabrics, uses a lot of gas and
electricity, and generates indoor heat which is very undesirable at the
height of summer. Hanging all my laundry to dry sounded pretty
labor-intensive, but if it would reduce both my environmental footprint
and the amount of dog hair on my clothes, it sounded like it would be
labor well spent.
I
ordered a retractable clothesline (made of plastic, ugh—but that was
bound to hold up to the elements better than any natural materials) from Home Depot. It was 50 feet long, long enough to run from my shed
to a corner of the house which conveniently already had nails sticking
out of it, and once I'd figured out a way to attach the clothesline housing to the sheet-metal shed without ripping holes in the metal (I screwed through the
shed wall into small wood blocks to help distribute the load), it was laundry time!
I
quickly grew to love the clothesline. Although hanging the clothes took
significantly longer than stuffing them into a dryer and pushing Start, I
found something pleasantly quaint about the whole practice. And, as
mindless chores go, it was oddly soothing to perform. At that time, I
was working from home, so I could wash my clothes in the morning, and
the minutes I spent doing laundry became welcome breaks from work. Plus,
the colorful array of garments outside my window reminded me of a
festive string of flags—like fun and functional backyard decor!
Of
course, there are definite downsides to air-drying your laundry. If you
start too late, it'll still be damp when the sun sets; and leaving
it out overnight, while possible, tends to result in it getting dewy
and slowing the drying process. Sometimes bugs crawl into the clothes or
spiders build webs on them! So you really must start in the morning and
have the better part of the day to leave the clothes outside. When you
don't have the luxury of working from home, timing of the wash can be a
challenge.
A 50-foot clothesline,
no matter how tautly you pull it, will sag under the weight of its load,
unfortunately low enough that even if the clothes don't quite touch the
ground, they're still low enough that your dog can pee on them. Yes,
it's happened.
I also find
something disconcerting about airing my undies for all the neighbors to
see, but I've found a way to work around that. I just I drape my more
personal garments over the edge of the laundry basket and set them in a
corner of the yard where they're hidden by a fence.
And
then there's the matter of towels. Cotton terrycloth doesn't get very fluffy on a clothesline, but if you like drying yourself off with stiff sheets
of sandpaper, it probably won't be a problem for you!
