Prose: Ode to Hanging Clothes

The morning quiet…some gurgling sounds from next door as my neighbor’s swamp cooler runs…some tweets in the distant trees from small birds commenting on the day. It’s summer, everything’s green and blooming, and I’m grateful for the mild morning.
The dry heat will increase as we move toward noon, and people move toward their swamp coolers and air conditioners. Yet now I enjoy the calm coolness of early morning.
My sheets are draped over the clothesline while the lack of humidity in the western
clime sucks out the moisture from the fabric in less than an hour.

I’ve always loved to hang clothes out on a clothesline… whether it was in New Jersey near the beach, when my older sons were young, or here in Colorado with dry heat and heavy snows in winter and three more kids.
I love doing laundry. For some people, this might seem pretty strange, especially the solar drying. Hanging clothes outside to air dry and then taking them down hours later fulfills something in me. Burying my face into them each time, as I carry the armloads into the house to fold, gives me enjoyment.
I can’t tell you why. I just know it’s always been true.

I used to hand wash most of my clothes, except jeans, and hang them out alongside kids’ clothes and household things that had all been machine washed. I felt hand washing was gentler on the fabric and my clothes would last longer.
However, as my family grew, so did my washing machine use. Using a ‘delicate’ cycle for most things, it was done sooner and easier. Then I could hang them on the lines, through all the seasons. Sometimes I’d wait through a snowy day or two, and if the sun came out, so did I with my wet laundry in hand. Some days I used an indoor drying rack placed near a heater vent.
Standing alone outside, usually quiet around me, sorting the clothes and the best way to hang them…the sun shining on leaves and me, a car might drive by, birds overhead with crows cawing in the distance…it’s a peaceful place to be.

I’ve thought about why this is. Did it come with the ‘back to the land’ movement in the hippie days and eating organic foods? No, actually it began when I was growing up in NYC and had a washroom next to our basement apartment. In that room, was a wringer washer and lots of clotheslines strung across the entire space for my family and my grandparents. Then when we moved to New Jersey after I finished 8th grade Catholic school, we had a wringer washer again, brand new, and my dad put up clotheslines outside, running from the wrap-around porch’s post out into the year to a standing post there, the lines on a pulley.
Might I think beyond that and wonder if it was a past-life carryover from any lifetime and culture before the present industrial age? Who knows. Did I take in laundry and sustain myself…and so this is good karma.
Or maybe it’s just a simple pleasure that speaks to me and gives me a sweet satisfaction.

Recently in a conversation with my old friend, Susan, she confessed to the same joy in hanging out clothes. She agreed it was almost silly. She recounted the time her husband offered to help, and she refused, saying she loved doing this herself.
I look up as a breeze lifts the sheets into the air, filling them with sunshine and that sweet scent I love to sleep in. Who would have thought hanging clothes on a clothesline could encompass all of this.

Jyoti