Hang It Up

With all the concern today about energy conservation, people are replacing light bulbs, buying hybrid and more energy-efficient cars, insulating homes and water heaters, turning off electronic devices when not in use, purchasing “green” products, and making other earth-friendly efforts. But few consider resurrecting the clothesline. Ninety-one percent of detached single-family homes in the United States have a clothes dryer, and a single electric model can spew some 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.

I saw the clothesline fall out of fashion around the early 1980s, when ever more households acquired their first dryers and new upscale housing developments with restrictive covenants sprang up. These covenants decreed no garage doors facing the road, no lawn ornaments, no trailers or RVs on the property, and certainly no clotheslines. (Recognizing how widespread the anti-clothesline sentiment is, the nonprofit Project Laundry List, based in New Hampshire, has as one of its missions to help overturn outdoor clothes-drying bans across the country.) Also in the ’80s, I recall being on several vacations in hotels in the South where for the first time guests were restricted from hanging their wet towels and bathing suits over porch railings. “Tacky, tacky,” hotel staffers claimed, and you could be fined if you dared air your wares in public.

How is it then that “tacky, tacky” here is construed as “charming, local ambience” in other parts of the world? Been to Europe lately? People in Venice, Rome, and many other popular destinations have no problem with airing laundry in public. Of course, many don’t do it for the ambience – it’s a cheaper, more practical, and culturally accepted practice.

The Chinese, at least those in the burgeoning cities of Shanghai and Beijing, think they have arrived now that most of them own washing machines. Clothes dryers are another thing. People there tend to hang their laundry on balconies and porches with wanton disregard for keeping up the neighborhood; they simply want to dry their clothes, thereby saving their major energy consumption for uses such as refrigeration, air conditioning, and lighting. Good thing, too, given the world’s already voracious energy consumption.

I have a love/hate attitude toward my own clothes dryer. It sure makes laundry easy and removes every speck of lint and cat hair. It’s a luxury I often take for granted, especially during cold winter months. But I am not so old that I have forgotten my mother’s approach to drying laundry, as well as the practices of my mother-in-law and both my grandmothers. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, the wash got hung outside. Always outside. Often as a youngster, it was my job to bring the items in off the line. And if they were frozen, the clothes would get rehung on lines strung up all over the basement. Back then, houses were often heated by oil or even coal, so an added feature of this heat was a warm basement and, therefore, warm clothes.

Now it’s easier to find clothespins in craft stores than in hardware stores. I wonder if kids today even recognize what the wooden or plastic object is, thinking that perhaps it is a variety of chip-clip – which, in truth, is what I have been using my clothespins for.

But that is about to change. Having done everything else I can to reduce my home-energy consumption short of replacing windows and Tyvek-ing the exterior, I now plan to put up a clothesline in my semi-rural backyard. The task of running a retractable line from the garage to a tree some 20 feet away is on my husband’s “honey do” list.

So, in advance, apologies to my neighbors who may take offense. Be assured that the trees will camouflage my sheets, towels, T-shirts, and jeans flapping in the breeze until fall. I hope that, by then, there will be others in the neighborhood who have decided this is a responsible way to go – and my shirt sleeves will be waving to theirs.

Janet Dilts, a freelance writer, lives in Exeter, New Hampshire. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.