Getting Clotheslined

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!

I wouldn't recommend using a clothesline as the only means of drying your laundry, because there are just some days when it's too wet or too cold for it to be practical. I still have the gas dryer for those days, but I use it a lot less now. The rest of the time, I happily put on my flapping fashion show. For me, the satisfaction of reduced energy use (and the joy of pretending I'm a pioneer woman!) outweighs the drawbacks.

Oh, and remember the reason I bought the clothesline in the first place? That part about line-drying being a panacea for dog-fur infestations? Well, I've left clothes on the line for days. I've left them out in high winds and torrential rains, and the fur in my sweaters remains undisturbed. All the forces of nature combined are no match for the tenacious grip of a single dog hair. So while hanging my clothes on a line has proved a welcome practice in many ways, in the specific area of dog-fur-management, I'll be hanged if I wasn't fed a line!