Another lost art: Hanging out the wash
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By Bill Wundram | Sunday, May 04, 2008 |
MY wife had this complaint: “I think our clothes dryer isn’t working.” I had a snappy answer: “Then, hang out.”
“Hang out” are two words that never left our lexicon of life. You don’t regularly see it defined, like you once did in all backyards. But people still “hang out,” meaning clothes flapping in the breeze like the sails on a ship.
Mostly, I see clotheslines out in the country. I will slow down when I see those sheets and pillowcases and shirts whipping in the wind. It is a glorious sight.
Most of the new Quad-City housing areas will not tolerate clotheslines. Once, we lived in a condo complex where the rules — in fine print — said that clothes poles and clotheslines were not permitted. There is no reason why clotheslines should be ostracized. They are pure Americana and downright energy savers.
Thankfully, our clothes dryer fixed itself. We’re certain that our neighbors would not look kindly upon clothes poles and a line in our lawn.
I was reared in a clothesline household. It was a Monday morning rite for my dad to stretch the rope from a hook in the thick trunk of the walnut tree, down to a round iron clothes pole in the back yard, and then criss-cross over the yard to another clothes pole, and then back to the walnut tree. The clothes poles had tops, in the shape of a “T” so that two or three lines could be strung back and forth to handle more clothing to dry.
My mother would lug a basket of wet clothes from the basement washer and hang them on the lines. Shirts were together, as were the sheets and towels. It was a sign of a good housewife to hang out a neat line of clothes. The neighbor women would cluck if someone new in the neighborhood hung her clothes haphazardly. Even worse was if the sheets were not as white as the driven snow, or if there were spots on the shirts.
Hanging out was a sacrament, to be followed with great orderliness. My mother had a special wash day apron, with a long pocket across the front to hold the clothes pins. Those peg-like pins had round knobs at the top. She didn’t go for those fancy spring-y clothes pins, because she said they were unsafe. Clothes pins had to be sturdy, because one pin would do double-duty, holding — for example — the edges of two dish towels at once.
Because they were wet, the clothes would sag and test the strength of the line and — good grief — might touch the ground. That’s why everyone had clothes props. They were long, sturdy poles with a notch at the top to slip into the line. Every household had at least a half-dozen clothes props.
Clotheslines filled with clothes were a beautiful sight on a Monday morning. Clothes would be drying in the wind for blocks on end. Those flapping sheets and shirts looked like the sailing ships in an America’s Cup race.
By mid-afternoon the clothes would be dry, and with that came a luscious smell. There is nothing on God’s earth that can replace the essence of a just-dried sheet, filled with Mother Nature’s wind-swept soul.
I have a sister-in-law, Barbara, who is a psychologist. She rises early in the morning and washes and hangs out her sheets and pillowcases every day that the sun shines. In the summer, that can be at least six days a week.
The first house we bought on Brady Street in Davenport had a big backyard with a cute cigar box-size house, but my wife said, “There are no clothes poles.”
We had been in this honeymoon cottage for less than a week when she insisted: “You have to put up some clothes poles!”
Those thick clothes poles — anchored in the ground in cement — are long gone. That back yard is now part of the Kmart parking lot.
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.
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