When
I was a child in the 1950s, I loved helping my mother hang out the
laundry to dry. She had a special window installed in the sun porch
at the back of the house so she could stay warm inside during the
winter while easily reaching the clothesline. My job was to hand her
the clothes pegs and later to help fold. I still remember the
wonderfully fresh smell the sheets had…a scent that lingered even
when they were on my bed. I’ve been able to hang out my own family’s
laundry to dry occasionally since, but too often, we’ve lived in
houses where clotheslines were forbidden on aesthetic grounds or in
balcony-less apartments where clotheslines were impossible even if
they had been legal. But these days, concerned about global warming
and the cost of energy, we’re letting it all hang out, like hasn’t
been seen in a generation.
In fact, bans on clotheslines may be going the way
of cosmetic pesticides and cigarette smoking in public places. There
is even a “Right to Dry” activist movement that is trying to
establish clothesline rights. This laundry underground includes
those frugal folks who’ve always used a clothesline and are a bit
befuddled as to what all the fuss is about, people from countries
where hanging out the laundry is part of the culture, those who
don’t like other people making up rules regarding their lifestyle
habits, and those who realize that foregoing a clothes dryer is an
easy adjustment to make in order to reduce the amount of carbon
dioxide sent into the atmosphere.
Although these initiatives are springing up
spontaneously across North America (Europeans really never gave up
the clothesline) they are networked through an organization called
Project Laundry List,
founded in New Hampshire in 1995 by a young lawyer named Alexander
Lee. Project Laundry List uses words, images and advocacy to educate
people about how simple lifestyle modifications – including
air-drying one’s clothes – reduce our dependence on environmentally
and culturally costly energy sources. The organization started when
students at New Hampshire’s Middlebury College, concerned about
Hydro-Quebec’s plans for major dam projects and the expansion of
nuclear power, started to hang political messages on a clothesline
at protests. Now, its Right to Dry Campaign encourages lawmakers to
introduce Right to Dry legislation that would prevent community
covenants, landlord prohibitions and zoning laws that stop people
from using clotheslines...
Wendy Priesnitz is the Editor of
Natural Life Magazine and a journalist with 30 years of experience.
She has also authored nine
books.
Read her
blog.
