Laundry

The reason I moved to the country.

Well, maybe not the only reason. But a big part of it. I wanted to hang my laundry on a line. I wanted that scratchy feeling of air-dried -- sun-dried -- bath towels. I wanted to hang up my clothes on a warm sunny breezy morning and have them dry before I was finished. I wanted to have that fabulous fresh air smell in my sheets.

When my realtor asked me why I was ambivalent about the house, I told him I didn't see a place to install a laundry line. He laughed, and at my request, gave us this line as a selling present (what a weird thing, a selling present, or whatever they call it).

It sat in the garage for the first year. We weren't sure where to put it, and the woods were so close to the house, and the pachysandra so thick, there wasn't really room for it in our yard. Back, only, the front has too many trees, not to mention pachysandra. But then Dave got the bright idea to take his mother's lawn mower -- she has a yard service now and doesn't use it -- and mow down all those nasty vines. The pachysandra is actually receding a bit, and he immediately put down grass seed. And now we are getting grass in our back yard! Wow!

In the meantime, our friend Peggy suggested, since we didn't know where to locate the thing, that we put it in a bucket of cement -- she had just the bucket for us -- and let it stay portable. The only problem is that the center pole is meant to be partly in the ground, and if we leave it in the bucket, the lines to hang the clothes are so high I can't reach them. There's two parts to the pole, though, and Dave took out one of them. Now it's so low, pants almost touch, but most stuff is okay.

Oh, and the other problem is, we never bothered to take it down last fall until a branch fell on it and smushed the bars. Dave put a split on them and made it almost as good as new. Good thing we made it portable, though, as I've decided I want it out the door off our kitchen instead of the garage. I bring the laundry up from the basement through the house and out onto the deck and down to the yard, but that's okay. I like being able to see it from my bedroom, or the kitchen; it's a good reminder to bring it in.

We had had a line just off the porch to a tree, but it was so tall, and it wasn't on a pulley, that I couldn't reach most of it. This works better. Dave is thinking about attaching the second pole and bringing the entire thing close to the edge of the deck. Then I could stand on the deck near the grill and hang laundry from there. I'm not so sure that's a good idea -- for one thing, I doubt I'd be able to rotate the thing to the other side of lines, never mind reach the middle ones -- but if it did work, I'd be really happy.

Still, this is fun. It'll need to get raised up a bit eventually, but for now Lily can reach it pretty well. She helped me hang some clothes on Monday -- don't hang my bras out there, Mama! -- and then helped me bring some of it in. This was a big, big load, full of lots of tiny stuff, like socks and underwear, so it took forever, and a million clothes pins (I used almost all of the three packs I had) to hang it up. Taking it down is easier, of course.

And then folding it is lovely. It smells good, it feels good, it's really dry, and and really warm. I can't wait to hang my sheets.