Right in my Own Backyard - Backyards: Yesterday's Clothes Dryer - by Brandt Carter
posted: Jul. 21, 2022
Backyards: Yesterday's Clothes Dryer
There was a time when clotheslines were a fixture in most backyards. Those that remain today are largely relics. What's more, a day commonly designated for doing laundry is also a thing of the past. It used to be that most women would soap, scrub, bleach, rinse and dry on Mondays. My grandmother liked to be the first in her neighborhood to have her lines filled on Wash Day.
Memories of loads and loads of laundry moving through the laborious sequence of sorting, washing, starching and hanging out on the line still linger. Some folks may even remember wringer washers and washboards. While those items are before my time, I do recall the vat of starch cooking on the stove. Those days preceded canned spray starch. In the '50s there were no clothes dryers. Instead, the basement was the drying space in winter and, in better weather, the backyard provided this function. Every house had clotheslines.
Nowadays, we're more likely to see clothes on a line when driving in the country. In the city, dryers have trumped the backyard. Many of the accessories that went with line-drying laundry have gone by the wayside, too. Colorful, plastic clothespins, decorative clothespin bags, umbrella-style and free-standing clotheslines have become hard-to-find items. The metal stretchers that we used to stuff into each leg of wet pants to help decrease wrinkles are largely extinct as well. Pegged wooden clothes pins, once so necessary to Laundry Day, are more commonly used for craft projects today.
While laundry has largely become a process of transferring washing from one machine to another, clothes rarely hanging on a line in the backyard are still a comforting visual to me. Memories of laundry fluttering in the breeze on a windy day or stiff and cold if hung on a winter day still make me smile. How well I remember scurrying to fetch linens and clothes off the line in a sudden downpour. As pleasurable as spray-on linen fresheners and herbal sachets in clothes dryers are today, the smell of line-dried sheets remains unforgettable.
brandt@broadripplegazette.com