A little known fact....

I'm not sure why I thought of this, at this very moment, on this particular Sunday in January, but I did. I used to have a clothesline. Yes, a real one, made from metal poles from which two lines were strung. I hung my clothes out to dry for 22 yrs. Then we moved into the new house. I figured it was time to move into the 20th century, so I bought a dryer. You would have thought I would have sprung much earlier in our marriage, when the kids were young and dirty laundry plentiful. I held firm through those years, washing every Saturday. I would start in the morning, dilligently hanging each washed load on the line. Sometimes if I was lucky, and it was a hot day, when the last load was hung, I could take the 1st load off. The only bad thing in summer was the humidity. If it was really humid, the clothes sometimes soured and I would have to wash them over again. That was a pain for sure. When winter came, I just hung them up in our little mud room. Winter was different, as I would have to start on Friday so they could dry overnight. Now, that was a pain too. Clothes hanging up for 3 days tends to make you somewhat ill. Especially if you had to push them aside to get out the back door.

I don't think my kids knew about "soft towels" until they had the good fortune of showering over at a friends house. That's when they would ask why ours were so rough. HeHe. And the jeans, on cold days, they practically stood up by themselves. So, in my way of thinking it was actually a good thing we never had a dryer. Those rough feeling clothes and towels were actually natural exfoliants. Plus, we never had to worry about shrinking anything and our clothes lasted forever!

So, my point here is the dryer has not really made my life any easier. I do know my electric bill is higher. Sunshine is free. The DH once had a guy ask him, "How do you dry your clothes when you don't have a dryer"? (Duh). He said, "We hang them on the line". The guy was amazed. I do plan to start hanging my clothes back out when we finish the porch so once again, I'll be able to see clean clothes fluttering in the wind. And, if I'm lucky between now and then, I can score me a couple of old clothesline poles.