Epic clothesline nostalgia
Cowgirl Sass And Savvy

By: Julie Carter

On a recent walk through my yard on the way to peer over the back fence, I ducked under the clothesline.

There are a couple of generations of us left that do that without a given thought. It's there. We duck.

However, this time, something occurred to me about that old clothesline.

I've raised children who now have children and none of them have used a clothesline.

If they lived anywhere there was one, it might have served to throw a rug over or tie the dog to, but never did they experience life's connection offered by a clothesline.

Never did they know about wiping off the lines with a cloth before hanging up the freshly washed clothes.

They didn't learn clothesline etiquette about hanging whites with whites and preferably the undies went on the line behind the bed sheets for propriety's sake.

And those bath towels, like drying off with sandpaper after a day in the sun and wind! I have to admit though, crawling into bed with fresh sheets that were sundried is aromatic heaven.

Shirts were hung by the tail, never by the shoulders. And the neighbors, if you had any, might raise an eyebrow if the whites were a dingy gray. Remember Mrs. Stewart's Bluing? I never did understand why putting blue stuff in the water would make the white clothes whiter.

Clothespins hung in a bag that stayed at the clothesline. It was a big upgrade when the pins went from the wooden peg-type to the ones with metal springs in them. That unleashed a whole new industry among inventive children who used them as fire-throwing catapults, mousetraps, rubber band shooters and detonators.

One could always tell how big the family was and the basic ages of the children by what hung on the clothesline.

The graduated sizes of jeans were always a clue, hung next to the shirts that went from Dad's denim work shirts to little striped T-shirts that looked like they'd been worn by several siblings through the years.

Socks were matched up before hanging by the toes so they could easily be folded or rolled when taken off the line.

And jean stretchers? Remember wrestling with those metal frames stuffed into Levi pantlegs to form a stout crease and minimize ironing? And make sure you got that crease dead-on straight.

I still have visions of my mother racing the rain that was blowing down off the mountain, pushing dirt clouds ahead of it and promising to ruin the efforts of her day-long washing project.

Grabbing huge armloads of clothes in one fell swoop, clothespins flying, she'd move to rescue, first, the sheets and white things that would most show the effect of the muddied drops.

And then there was winter. Our ranch house was at 8,200 feet in elevation and summer was very short. Therefore, for more months than not, clothes freezing on the line was the bigger problem.

In winter, it wasn't uncommon to have clothes, arriving frozen stiff from the line, strung around the dining room, hung on chairs and anything else that didn't move. And there was that flimsy folding rack that sat near the only source of heat in the main part of the house. I recall it full of drying diapers, long before the day of disposables.

Most of America has seen the last of these things. There remain a few that still hang on a line when they can.

Propped up in the middle by a two-by-four post, the old sagging lines still offer a friendly greeting to a home where clothes are cared for by love, not by Whirlpool.


See Julie’s Web site and blog at julie-carter.com.