Hanging Out

                                                                                  


I have been without an outdoor clothesline for about a year. It hasn't mattered too much because this past winter was more conducive to indoor drying. I am, however, very excited to get the new posts up and the string run. My beloved salvaged some nice heavy weight clothesline posts and set them in the ground. That provided a good lesson in post tamping for my 9 year old son. Saturday, I got the line and enlisted the help of some friends who were visiting to help me get the line taut and fend off the Yellow Jackets that were building in one of the cross pieces.
                                                                                  

                                                                              
As soon as it was tight and secure, I hung two loads of towels on it. It was a breezy afternoon  and the towels dried in about 15 minutes! Of course a few blew completely off the line onto the barbed wire where they also dried quickly. I personally don't mind perforated towels. I could have saved money on clothes pins and simply strung my line with barbed wire. This is the kind of thinking that frightens my husband sometimes. All I have to do is get that particular gleam in my eye and he gets concerned. Thank God he is more normal and has a better eye for aesthetics or this place would look like the Rube Goldberg version of Little House on the Prairie.

Clint has a decided sense of the fitness of things. He makes a mean bed, leaves the kitchen sparkling if he does the dishes, and folds towels so they look like the pictures in the catalog, all while riding in on a white horse to rescue me from...ugly makeshift home improvements such as barbed wire clothes lines. He is also very adept at keeping clocks and pictures straight on the walls.Our clothesline suits both of us. It was free and recycled which makes me happy and fits our budget and it fits into the natural landscape as if it grew there. That pleases my handsome husband.
                                 
                                                                                

I would like to challenge you, wherever you are to make a place for line drying your clothes. Of course it is politically correct to be green these days, but there is more to a clothesline than that. The clothesline gets you outside early in the morning and again later in the day to bring the clothes in. It encourages sensual pleasure. The clothes look pretty as they dance and flutter on the line. They smell heavenly as no laundry additive can mimic. They feel different, sometimes rougher, sometimes whipped to a soft suppleness. (You can always air fluff before or after hanging to soften your clothes if line drying makes them too stiff) You can even close your eyes and listen to your clothes on the line. If you want to know what the clothesline experience should be like, hang some sheets and let them play their pied piper song to your small children. Before you know it they will be reveling in their senses and you will be ensuring that another generation of people will associate clothes on the line with pleasant memories.