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This is a correction. Countless times have I rhapsodized about hanging my clothes outdoors, my clothes on a line, my laundry drying in the sun, drifting with the breezes. Ain't that a pretty picture?
I cheerfully hang my laundry on the line all summer long, which is to say for a good three or four of the twelve months of the year. As I perform this ancient task I imagine myself joining the ranks of pioneer women, or at least farm women (small-town women) from my own rural upbringing. Such nostalgia. Such reverence for tradition.
And what am I overlooking? Well, reality, for one thing. We have a dryer in the basement, one of those modern conveniences that function on electricity. At the slightest hint of bad weather, those clothes of mine hit the dryer. In fact, during the eight or nine or ten non-warm months of our year, the retractable clothes line sits on a shelf in the basement, not even an option.
Here's what doesn't happen: I don't go out in the cold to hang my clothes, ever. I don't unpin my frozen laundry from the line and carry the items inside like two-dimensional people, stiff and cold, to spread them over the furniture until they thaw to a damp, relaxed state and then re-hang them on an overcrowded wooden rack until they are semi-dry and stink of mildew.
In short, I experience only the hobbyist's version of "hanging out the clothes." If I were forced to live the reality of it—clothes on the line, rain or shine, sleet or snow or 40-below—I would be singing a different tune. If I were washing clothes for a young family of three or four children, with a baby or two in diapers—and washing every day and drying clothes indoors during the months of inclement weather, you'd see my beatific smile change to scowls and worry lines.
By glamourizing the sweet-clothes-dried-in-the-sun aspect of this, I am ignoring and thus diminishing the reality for many women—not just women from our past but those millions who are totally dependent on the vagaries of weather to keep their families presentable.
I apologize wholeheartedly to all those who hang out their clothes from necessity and not from choice. I am a dilettante. All I can say in my defense is that I do love it. But it is important for me to recognize the limitations of my experience and to salute, clothespins in hand, those intrepid women who do the necessary, simply because it has to be done.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
