2007
insanity is our hospitality
maura @ 10:53 pm
Is it weird to have clothesline envy? If you have to ask, the answer is probably yes. Gus’s school is in an old neighborhood full of townhouses and brownstones that is still close enough to the Western European immigrant experience* to have big poles at the edge of each backyard lot, with pulleys attaching a clothesline to the windowsill of each floor. Every time I do drop off or pickup I see the clotheslines and think: LUCKY DUCKS.
* Though it is far enough away that only a few of the clotheslines are ever in use.
I want a clothesline! The increasing crunchiness of me over the past few years has resulted in many new activities, like washing ziploc bags, using old washcloths to clean rather than paper towels, and, recently, clothes-dryer avoidance. Dryers use a ton of electricity. It’s expensive!** Plus we don’t have a dryer that vents to the outside world, which means OPRESSIVE heat in the summer if we run it. Even in the winter, though, I fear the minute particles of lint that are not being trapped by our elaborate indoor dryer venting + lint trapping mechanism and are flying around our apartment, just waiting to get us. Or at the very least to settle on the vents in the bathroom and make them fuzzy, which looks gross.
** We recently switched to the wind power option that our local electric dictators offer, which is a little more expensive than the old-fashioned non-green (brown?) way.
The problem is that there’s a limited amount of space in which to hang clothes to dry in our 2BR apt. We do have a drying rack that can handle most of one load of laundry and folds for storage. And I hang some things on hangers from the shower rod. I’m also not 100% airdrying yet — towels are just too stiff and scratchy, and sheets are too big.
One of my neighbors is also an airdryer. Her apartment is directly across from ours and we’ve jokingly talked about stringing a clothesline on pulleys between us. People would likely flip out to see our underwear strung over the courtyard in the center of the building. But the bigger problem is that she lives two floors above us, so I think that gravity would pull all of the laundry down to our house. Kind of inconvenient.
5 comments on “insanity is our hospitality”
I know, I’ve always thought it was so crazy that some housing associations ban clotheslines! I keep thinking of these crazy ways to string a pulley between our fire escape and a bedroom window, which would not work in the summer anyway because that window’s where we put the a/c. Oh well, the good thing about wet clothes drying in the house is that it helps humid up that dry winter air.
happy blogiversary, d00d. two years, no tears.
Wow, it *has* been two years, that is a little scary.
[…] know, I try to be a good hippie: hanging our clothes to dry, intermittent composting, buying most clothes secondhand, etc. I’m not the biggest fan […]
Yeah, I love our clothesline! I would not live anywhere where I was forbidden to have one (at least by some Nazi housing committee–your circumstances are different). My mom always had one, partly because our dryer was broken, but also just because. We heat the house with our dryer in the winter but as soon as it’s nice out (like today!) out go the clothes.