Recently my aunt found an old clothespin bag from my grandmother and sent me a few of her clothespins as a memento. Seeing the clothespins immediately sent me down memory lane. I remembered the sheets hanging on my grandmother's line when we visited and the overalls that were worn by both my father and Theo that had hung on the same line. But mostly, my thoughts centered around hanging up clothes during my youth.
Our family got a dryer when I was a baby and my mother always talked about how happy she was when she got it. She was finally going to have a way to dry diapers and everyone else's clothes on a rainy day. However, we still hung most of our clothes outside. I remember that my father put up a clothesline just for me and it was my job to hang up all of the washcloths. And as time went on, I took my turn hanging up all of the wash. I learned how to stretch the clothes to have the fewest wrinkles and hang shirts from the tails instead of the shoulders. I also learned about sublimation at home long before I learned about it in school because we hung out clothes all times of the year even when they froze on the line. But they did get dry even if it took a little longer than in the summer.
And I learned at church to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. So when my mother had no other choice than to do the wash on a Sunday, I worried about what the neighbors would think when they saw it hanging outside. Now I understood that they thought here is a woman with a big family that sometimes had to catch up on things after church. But most of all, I learned the wonderful smell of clothes dried in the sunshine. There was nothing better than climbing into bed with freshly washed sheets that had dried outside.
Today, I don't hang up clothes outside because of allergy problems in the family. We dry them either in the dryer or on folding drying racks. Most of the time I don't think much about this part of our laundry routine, but today as I go down memory lane, I sure do miss the smell of freshly dried sheets from the line outside.
The second clothespin from the right is the style my mom used. I grew up in the country, so no worries if you hung your clothing out on Sundays--nobody could see into our back yard.
ReplyDeleteI only use a clothesline when we camp. There is definitely an art to it.
We had a few clip clothespins, but we used the same style as you did. It's hard to find those now except in crafts stores to make clothespin dolls with. Clip clothespins seem to be more prevalent these days.
DeleteMy grandmother had one of those umbrella style outdoor clothes drying contraptions, when I was growing up. We grew up with a tumble dryer, so my sister and I didn't know what that thing was for. Now, I use a combination of racks and our dryer. I do think fabrics wear more quickly when machine dried. But sometimes it just feels simpler to use the dryer.
ReplyDeleteWe had a washer where the agitator went up and down instead of back and forth. My father was very proud of how much cleaner the clothes got with that kind of washer, but things did wear out a lot faster. This was especially evident with our towels. I haven't really thought about the dryer wearing things out faster, but that makes sense.
DeleteWe always hung our laundry to drip dry in the basement when I was a kid. I guess it was more convenient than hauling it outside, but it sorta seems like the worst of both worlds to me - the work of hanging it to dry without the freshness that comes from the sunshine and air. I use the dryer from time to time, especially during the height or winter or in the fall when my allergies are bad, but I LOVE the crisp clean feel of clothes dried in the sunlight.
ReplyDeleteYour remarks about hanging clothes to dry on Sundays were a revelation for me. I was raised in an atheist family, so ideas like keeping the Sabbath holy are a bit foreign to me. When I went to Norway (which has a state religion of Lutheranism) as an exchange student, one of the first cultural things that hit me in the face was that I did my laundry and hung it outside on Sunday. My host mother was FURIOUS! She snatched the clothes off the line and said something like "If you MUST do laundry on a Sunday, at LEAST have the good graces not to hang it outside!"
I was completely and utterly flummoxed! In our house, if chores got done at all, they got done on Sunday because it was the only day when Mom wasn't working and we didn't have things like soccer games etc. I guess I always thought it was just some sort of weird Norwegian thing - it never occurred to me that it was a Christian thing! Oh, the blind spots of being raised in a completely different cultural reality from those around me...
Things changed when we got older, but we did a lot of typical Mayberry-like Sunday things when I was a kid. We went to church in the morning and came home to a dinner of fried chicken or roast beef. We even took Sunday drives sometimes which I never liked because I got carsick. But my bed-ridden grandmother came to live with us and my mother went back to work full-time as a nurse, so the Sunday routines changed.
DeleteI was about 9 when my parents got a dryer. When I was very small I took my red chair out to the clothesline and hung the washcloths while mom hung the rest of the clothes. As we got older I don't remember hanging many except during the summertime, but I remember it being my job to go take the clothes off the line. And I remember if it rained we would all make a bee line to the clothes to get them in before they are ruined.
ReplyDeleteWe had a maid twice a month when I was little and she loved to iron. She also loved starch and she would cook a large pot of starch when she was there. Nothing sleeps better than sun dried lightly starched sheets. It is something no one in my house will get to experience though, since I don't iron, much less starch the sheets.
I remember those mad dashes to the clothesline when it was starting to rain.
DeleteWe had our starch in a sprinkling bottle and one of my jobs when I was little was sprinkling the clothes. We would then roll them up and put them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator until there was time to iron them. While many of our clothes were starched, I never remember our sheets being starched.
We rolled my dad's shirts and put them in the refrigerator too! The only reason we had starched sheets was because Eddie Lee loved to iron. She came every other week and we had 2 sets of sheets for each bed. The mornings she came we had to be out of bed early so they could be washed and partially dried before she got there. She ironed and starched 2 sets of sheets for each bed (only 2 beds since my sister and I shared a bed at that time)
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