Laundry Lines: Letting It All Hang Out

This breezy September morning-with the sun at an oblique angle and the temperature hovering around 70 dry degrees-is ripe for hanging out laundry. Of course, by the time I pin the last bed sheet to the line, the clouds might move in over Cape Cod. The vagaries of New England weather (and birds, on occasion) make outdoor drying a challenge. So why don’t I just throw in the towel, so to speak, and use the electric clothes dryer?

There’s a measure of Yankee frugality involved: Why consume electricity running the dryer when fresh air and sunshine are free? There’s also a helping of self-indulgence: I enjoy the clean-cotton fragrance and the sensation of slipping my body between sun-starched sheets.
ENERGY SAVINGS

The clothes dryer is one of the home’s biggest electricity consumers, drawing anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 watts of power, according to the US Department of Energy. I save about $20 per month by avoiding the electric clothes dryer. Project Laundry List, a non-profit organization promoting air-drying laundry, says if Americans would use clotheslines or drying racks, the savings would be enough to shutter several power plants.

Some homeowners’ associations prohibit the use of outdoor clotheslines. I recently read a newspaper article about a New Hampshire woman who is fighting for her right to use one. My sister, who lives in Florida, must hide hers within a screened enclosure. During the years I lived in Florida, I never once hung out laundry. It’s just not done, especially in tonier neighborhoods where a clothesline would be frowned upon as a poor-man’s contraption. In the South, if you can afford a clothes dryer, you use it. The only place I ever saw a laundry line was outside somebody’s trailer.

When I returned home to New England 12 years ago, I thought I might find that putting out the wash had gone out of vogue. No, indeed. Some Yankees still air-dry the laundry.
Hanging out your laundry for your neighbors to see keeps you honest. Who wants to air dirty laundry, after all? In my family, hanging out the wash is an art.

As a girl attending afternoon coffee gatherings at the home of my great aunt, I listened intently as my grandmother and her three sisters discussed the neighbors’ laundry in between sips of coffee and bites of cake or pie.

“Now, she hangs a nice wash,” one would say. Or, “she hangs a lousy wash.”

I recall with sterling clarity the day my Aunt Mary mentioned a neighbor who pinned underwear to the line at the crotch. Pushing up her eyeglasses and waving an admonishing finger, Mary declared, “She does that so you won’t see the stains.”

Even if it means standing over the sink scrubbing the white cotton underwear before it goes into the washing machine, I always hang the briefs by the waistband. Colored underwear would make life easier, but it wouldn’t keep me honest.

Whites are the biggest challenge. I would be ashamed to hang whites that are anything other than blinding, so I often find myself enlisting Borax’s 20-mule team-the green alternative to chlorine bleach. The sun is a great whitener, as well.

And I wouldn’t dare hang out a mixed load because this would show my ignorance of the finer points of clothes care. You don’t mix whites with colored clothes because of the possibility of dyes running. Using cold water minimizes the risk of this and also cuts energy costs. According to the US Department of Energy, just heating the water accounts for 90 percent of the energy used in washing clothes. Merely switching from hot to warm water can cut a load’s energy consumption in half.

Tips

Laundry lines say a lot about a person. But, most important, they are environmentally friendly. Here are some tips for hanging laundry outdoors:

1. If you don’t have time in the morning to wash clothes and hang them out to dry, put the laundry in the washer the night before you plan to hang it out.
2. If you’re embarrassed to hang out lingerie, try my mother’s method: panties and bras on the inside lines and other articles, such as T-shirts, on the outside lines to hide the unmentionables.
3. If the laundry remains damp at the end of the drying day, put it on the short, “damp dry” cycle of your indoor clothes dryer. You’re still conserving energy and saving money.
4. If you dislike crisp towels, take them in before they are completely dry and run them through the dryer for a few minutes to fluff them. Again, this uses less energy than an entire drying cycle.
5. To reduce fading of colored clothes, turn the clothes inside out to hang them. Fear of fading aside, clothing looks better overall and lasts longer when air dried.