Life on the Line

My husband and I joke that there's a troll living in our basement.  We currently live in an older home built by his grandparents in 1960.  The underground lair is partially finished, damp, dimly lit, and generally "creepy" (as my younger sister, fifteen years my junior, calls it).  Thankfully, spiders don't bother me and the rare signs of a rodent don't send me screaming. Despite efforts at keeping it tidy, it's hard to make a place like this one inviting.  However, the utilitarian qualities of my basement are more than adequate to redeem it in my book.  There's a built-in set of pantry shelves for canned goods, an ancient and wonderfully reliable chest freezer, a nook with shelving for seasonal items, a room for storing orphaned extended family items, the wood stove et al, the recycling bins, the tools/hardware stash, and the washing machine/laundry/cleaning area complete with clothesline.  Yup, a clothesline.  I love it.



When I first married there were a few major household appliances I/we decided to do without: the microwave, the dishwasher, and the dryer.  The microwave went without a hitch.  It took us a couple months before we actually realized,"oh yeah...we still don't have a microwave".  The dishwasher was a valiant attempt but the demoralizing task of washing a heaping pile of dishes after a whiz bang day and a whopping made-from-scratch meal was more than either of us could handle.  After eight months my husband's parents took pity on us -- or got sick of the whining -- and gave us a portable dishwasher for Christmas that year.  Lesson Learned: We must have a dishwasher. (At least until we have a child and a step stool tall enough to pawn the job off to...kidding.)  One fellow homesteader put this spin on it -- if you're going to give your time and energy to growing, preserving, storing, and cooking all your food at least get something to wash your dishes if you need to!  Last but not least to go, the dryer.

After my first year of college I attended a language program in Italy during which I lived with an Italian family in a house on the outskirts of Bologna.  Though their home was true to European form in its compact nature, their property included a small yard and tiny detached apartment where my roommate and I stayed.  The family was seemingly upper middle-class, wonderfully hospitable, and very warm, going above and beyond their duty to us as academic hosts.  "Nonna", the unofficial grandmother and housemaid, insisted that she do our laundry and as if that didn't strike me enough I was more than a bit surprised to learn that the family had no dryer for their clothes.  I asked Senora about this and she simply replied, "Barely anyone has them. Electricity is simply too expensive here to waste it on one."  At the time I thought, "Go figure, practically everyone back home in the States has one and I'm sure those dryers use just as much electricity. Our electricity must simply be less expensive."  That was the first and last time I thought about doing without a dryer until I arrived in Kentucky nearly ten years later.

Unlike the dishwasher, there happened to be a dryer in the house when my husband and I moved in two years ago.  I used it a dozen times (mostly in the time it took us to buy and hang 75 feet of sturdy plastic-coated wire clothesline), but gave it away by the end of the year.  I had a couple  reasons for putting the dryer on our "Do Without It" List -- first, my effort at energy conservation wouldn't allow me to justify using a vastly significant amount of electricity (or propane) to accomplish something that the sun could do in a slightly longer period of time and with very little extra effort on my part; second, less electricity used = less money spent on bills = more money spent on things I WANT to spend my hard-earned resources on.  It just made sense in my live intentionally frame of mind.  Besides those two reasons there are at least a few perks...there's nothing like the fresh scent of sun-drenched, breeze-dried linens; there's nothing like a bit of sunshine to break up a day of house or office work; and as a person who is just as likely to leave the clothes somewhere until it's convenient to fold them, the clothesline yields far fewer wrinkles and a much neater outcome.

In all fairness and honesty there are a handful of drawbacks to "slow laundry" as it's come to be called. The most obvious is in the name...it's slow!  There's no such thing as washing those jeans at night and having them dry for the next day's adventure.  Not having a dryer takes a bit of forethought or at least a certain amount of wardrobe flexibility.  Second, line drying does NOT have the same lint-removal effect that a dryer has.  Sometimes I find swipes of gray lint spackled across red or dark clothing that would otherwise have been poofed off in the heated dry of an electric alternative.  I've learned to live with this minor annoyance and highly prize my lint and pill remover doodads for whatever hasn't come off in the breezy line-drying process.  Lastly, clothespins can sometimes leave creases where they've been anchoring my garb to the line for dear life.  While I'd rather have securely fastened clothes than ones strewn about my lawn, it is a bit awkward to don my favorite long sleeve tee with pointy indentations at each shoulder where they were once clipped to my clothesline.  After more than a few occasions like this I slowly learned some tips -- clip shirts from the bottom, sheets from the corners, and hoodies with the hood facing the sun (so the hood isn't damp in the shadows at the end of the day)....and leave undies on a rack dryer in the basement where they are less likely take up too much line space or end up blowing into the goat pasture.

Going back to slow laundry for a moment I will mention that there's a national movement enlisting support for people in suburban and urban communities where line drying clothing is actually illegal.  Silly as that may seem, I know I'd be up in arms if I had to grapple with those regulations.  So, for those of you interested, you can find more information (and line-drying tips) at laundrylist.org   Whether catching some Vitamin D and saving some fossil fuel-sourced energy with a clothesline or  cooking and eating a healthful locally-sourced meal as is encouraged by the Slow Food Movement (check out terramadre.org), personal choices such as these both help the planet and feed the soul.

 Whoa, Whoa, Whoa...I almost forgot one of the biggest factors of all -- WEATHER!  For lots of folks line drying is simply too much of a hassle because it's a cloudy, rainy day when the wash is ready to hang.  Again, I try to embrace a certain flexibility with such things because so much of humanity is bent on bending nature to it's will.  But there's also nothing wrong with sidestepping the issue altogether.  Monday is my typical wash day and as a creature of habit I like it to stay that way most weeks. Unfortunately I don't have much sway with the Weather Man and it's a toss up if Monday's weather will be amenable to my line drying ways.  I owe my ability to overcome this woe to my creepy basement where my husband's grandmother had the practical tactic of putting up a clothesline for just such occasions.  It's not only handy in the spring and summer rains but it's super toasty in the winter when my wood stove heat works double time to dry my loads of laundry.

Rain or shine I give life on the line two thumbs up.