(EASTERN MONTANA) – City living has its perks, in normal times at least. The constant pace and ever-changing street scenes feed my imagination. Los Angeles was my home for many years, and it still calls to me. I can’t quite give it up, and I miss it now that non-essential air travel is ill-advised, temporarily I hope. I love rural living equally as well or more. Montana skies really are big, and most days they are blue and clear. June here is often the rainy season, with brief fierce afternoon and evening thunderstorms and hail. Even so, there’s always plenty of sunshine in the spring, summer, and fall. In recent years, our winters have had a fair share of bright, warm days too.
So, drying clothes outside on a clothesline is easy and fast, almost year round. Hanging out laundry in single-digit temps is a little silly, because everything tends to freeze stiff as a board, but on those days I have indoor clothes racks that work just fine. The benefits of using the sun instead of gas or electricity for drying are legion: saving money, lengthening the lifespan of garments and linens, reducing the need for ironing, killing bacteria, and of course, conserving energy.
Air and sunshine are free.
Electric clothes dryers first came to market in 1938, invented by J. Ross Moore. They are energy hogs. Gas dryers use less but still a significant amount. A 2014 report by the NRDC claims Americans spend $9 billion on drying their clothes! And according to Wikipedia, “The environmental impact of clothes dryers is especially severe in the US and Canada, where over 80% of all homes have a clothes dryer.”
In the early ’aughts, as part of the Newtown Arts Festival in Pasadena, California, I created an installation titled “Evidence of Human Presence: Laundry.”
The festival, presented by Newtown Arts, was set in a wooded county park. My part was an interactive exhibition staged in a small clearing along a trail. I invited people to play. They could arrange colorful laundry on a clothesline, wash lingerie (!) in a washtub with water and soap, and strum a primitive homemade zither-ish musical instrument to mimic the sound of the wind. I wrote a backstory that I posted onsite. The presentation was lighthearted, but to my mind had serious underpinnings. Someone said it looked like a Depression-era camp. That tickled me, because that had been my minds’ eye model. When I overheard one twenty-something visitor say, “That’s like my ancestors used to use,” I knew my secret agenda was working.
I grew up with clotheslines, and never had a dryer of my own until I was married and past thirty. It was second-hand and didn’t work reliably, so I still had a backup clothesline. Apparently neighbors used to chat over their clotheslines; I was born too late to experience much of that. In Charlotte, we had one of those four-sided whirligig lines that looks like an upside down umbrella but it wasn’t next to the fence or the neighbors. My mom walked out the back door and leaned down over the side of our patio to spin it around. I also have vivid memories of a yearly passenger train ride cross-country as a kid, and always being amazed upon pulling into the Chicago rail yards at the highrise tenements with laundry pulley lines strung out of windows. When we moved to Santa Monica in the ‘sixties, it was to an apartment complex with a laundry room downstairs and a laundromat on the corner. There was no place for a clothesline. The laundromat was a social hub for the neighborhood homemakers. As a teenager I was too cool to hang out there unless I had to. Fortunately my mother enjoyed the camaraderie there and rarely asked me to help with the wash.
Laundry is a fact of life, city or rural. Apparently, it’s an embarrassment, something we need to hide, lest our personal foibles, aka humanity, be revealed to the world. It’s mind-blowing to me that many cities and communities actually ban outdoor clotheslines. “Showing your dirty laundry” is a derogatory epithet, but what is normally hung on a clothesline is washed, fresh, and clean. Too ragged, too ragtag perhaps? Not neutral and symmetrical enough to be an aesthetically acceptable complement to the landscape? Puhleeze. Part of my whimsical installation agenda was to show the random patterns and color palettes that we humans create daily and largely unintentionally — impromptu compositions if you will.
Well, I’m going to keep hanging out my laundry here in my back yard, on my grandma’s clothesline. I’m grateful there’s no ordinance prohibiting it. I enjoy the experience, and my clothes, towels, and sheets are surely grateful as well.
Call me a fanatic, but I’m not a purist, so I will admit three things.
1) I use spring-loaded clothespins because the old-fashioned two-part ones either stain my clothes or don’t hold up in the wind; 2) I hang my undergarments inside; and 3) I bought a mini-electric dryer last year to use in inclement weather. I have not taken the little guy on a trial run yet, but someday I… might. — Adele
Adele Field is a writer and editor based in rural eastern Montana.
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