As I stand in the backyard pinning my children’s underwear to a sagging clothesline, I wonder if this is what is meant by airing one’s dirty laundry in public. Surely not, I reflect. This laundry is perfectly clean. Yet there’s something about displaying all our clothing, towels, and sheets across the backyard that can make me feel a little ashamed, a little conspicuous here in the suburbs.
At times, as I shake clothes and pin them up, I imagine conversations with my neighbors. "Why don’t you get a dryer?" they ask. "What’s wrong with you people, hanging your stuff outside for everyone to see?"
It’s true all the fabric of our lives is here — torn jeans, faded sheets, jagged towels, stained t-shirts, stiff-collared button-downs, underwear, occasionally a dress. For many years the mix included diapers too.
In my imagination I conjure some haughty response. "Why don’t you mind your own business?" is usually the gist of it.
When we first moved into our house, one kindly neighbor did in fact greet me at the fence with the question, "Do you have a dryer?"
"No," I answered, my adrenaline rising. She had struck me as the wise woman of the street as well as the gossip. People consulted her and exchanged information about neighbors, so she had her finger on the pulse of public opinion. For a moment I feared what that public had to say about my laundry. Did people in the suburb think hanging clothes was tacky? Offensive? Crude?
"I know somebody who’s giving a dryer away if you want it," she said.
I felt somewhat relieved, though I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t dropping a big hint.
"No thanks," I told her. "We don’t use a dryer."
"Well," she said, shaking her head in a puzzled way, as if I had just told her we were ebdelatians and she didn’t want to admit she didn’t know what it meant.
I actually felt a little superior after that, having stumped the wise woman, but recently I found out there are neighborhood associations which forbid the hanging of clothing outdoors. I’ll be sure never to live in such a place, because despite my misgivings I intend to hang my laundry outdoors whenever possible.
Even some of my friends think I’m peculiar in this regard, since I’m not particularly domestic otherwise. They think I must love to iron the crumpled clothes they imagine coming from my laundry basket. In fact, my wind-blown clothes are never crumpled unless I leave them in the basket too long (something dryer owners are not immune to this). They wonder how I endure scratchy towels, but my towels are nearly as soft as dryer-dried, and more absorbent. And they don’t wear out as fast. And my jeans don’t shrink up two sizes before they wear out in the knees. And my kids’ clothes retain their bright colors.
Then there’s the energy we save by using solar power. Why waste a ready resource, one that’s sustainable and free for the taking? We probably save at least ten percent on our electric bill by not using a dryer. The clothes smell fresh. I get to be outdoors while I hang them. No other domestic chore except gardening allows me that time outside. While I’m pinching clothespins I can enjoy the scent of flowers, the breeze, the sunshine.
Then there are the less obvious benefits of hanging clothes, and these are more likely the reasons I’m not tempted to use the so-called labor-saving dryer. First, I feel connected to the millions of peoples past who have dried their laundry in the sun. I think of all those women standing at clotheslines swapping information about children, husbands, cooking — about getting the stains of life out of their clothes. I think of women in hard times, women with infants and young ones on their skirts, how they worked to stay clean and proud in the wild lands of America. I feel connected to women when I hang clothes.
But mostly, hanging laundry slows my life to a normal pace. Sometimes I wonder what kind of species we are who would bring into our homes a big metal box to do work for us which is easy, pleasant, direct, and free, work which takes us outdoors when too much of our lives is spent inside, work which is more natural and wholesome than putting wet things in the box and taking them out again an hour later, dry but literally diminished.
Though I no longer imagine a public outcry over my wash, I hang the more indiscreet items indoors, and tuck the kids’ underwear carefully behind the sheets so they can’t be seen from the road. Mostly, I just wish we weren’t the only ones airing our laundry. America would be a better place if everyone would come clean, and it might open the minds of a few people to stand out in the sun doing something human beings have been doing for millions of years.
Also, it would give me someone to talk to.