July
2008
A Small Action: Sweet Dreams On the Line. . .
. . . the clothesline.
Air-dried sheets and pillowcases, one of the luxuries of life, but the convenience of electric clothes dryers overrides the organic alternative right outside the door. We manage to dry ours outdoors all year long with surprisingly rare interference from weather. Sheets infused with the fragrance of a fresh green bouquet are bedtime bliss so we’ve become determined about this. We strategize how/if line drying is feasible on a given day, and we’ve rigged up a line that can be stretched from here to there when we need it.
After years of line drying for these personal reasons, I recognized the environmental bonus: that it’s a small but tangible action toward living green and especially meaningful if it becomes collective action. If this one sounds enticing, find a way to make it happen, for your own sweetest dreams first, and then for the planet’s.
(It’s summertime and the livin’s a little easier. Mondays we’re revisiting posts from the past. This is a curtain call for Sweet Dreams On the Line.)
NY Times Article, A Line in the Yard: The Battle Over the Right to Dry Outside
We started drying our sheets outside this summer, under the tree in our back yard. Boy, do they smell wonderful after an hour or two in the sun.
We hang laundry in our rather shady Back Forty (forty square feet), and even with not much sun everything ends up smelling fresh from the lovely air. For convenience our plastic clothesline is wound up in a round plastic spring-loaded case, bought at Hardwick’s and screwed to the wood structure that holds our rain barrels high up against the house (for good water pressure). We pull the line out and through a hook high on the garage woodwork, then attach the end to a hook on the fence post. When our triangle of drying is done, zip! goes the line back into its neat round case.
When we lived off the grid we air-dried everything (of course) but now we’ve backslided back in the city. KUOW had a show (yesterday, I think) on this subject and I was surprised to find out–okay, not so surprised, sadly–that something like 50% of homeowner cartels prohibit air-drying…’cause it’s so unsightly, y’know! When will we learn???