Reflections on the Clothesline

Published June, 2012

            I remember "laundry day" from when I was a little boy, and I don't miss it.  Monday was the day to do the dreaded chore, and that seemed the norm for most families.  Oh, how we prayed in church on Sunday for rain on Monday, because if it rained, we couldn't do laundry, because you see, we had a clothesline. 

            My sister and I were POLs, Prisoners of Laundry, for the entire day.  Washing of the clothes was well under way before us kids got out of bed, and as soon as breakfast was done, we were outside getting the clothesline ready to accept the hanging.  We got the clothespins down from the wall on the back porch where they hung in a bag sewed from mattress ticking, and carried them out to the line.  This was a misnomer, because it wasn't a line, it was several.

            Our clotheslines, four of them, were strung between two "T"s made of welded, three inch, pipe.  They were at least eight feet tall.  It was my job to take a ladder and a wet rag and wipe the wires used for lines.  In west Texas, where sand storms were the norm rather than the exception, this was a necessity, or you would end up with brown strips on whatever you hung on the line.  I enjoyed this job.  When I had reached as far as I could on the wire, I would grab it with both hands and swing like Tarzan to the ground, and then move the ladder.  My father, who had to tighten the lines, frowned on this, so I made sure that mama wasn't looking before I did it.

            As I grew older, so did my involvement in hanging the clothes.  My sister and I would carry #10 washtubs of wet laundry to the lines, and, under the direction of mama, we would hang clothes.  There were rules to this, and they were precise.

            Clothes were hung in a certain order, and to this day, I do the whites first.  Sheets and towels were hung on the outside lines so that the neighbors, or a stranger passing by, could not view the unmentionables hung on the inner lines.  Heaven help us if anyone knew we wore underwear.

            You hang socks by the toes, not the tops, pants by the cuffs, not the waistbands, and you never, never hang a shirt by the shoulders, always by the tails.  If you didn't, you would have to go back and re-hang them so that there wouldn't be pinch marks showing on daddy's shirts.

            We were required to be efficient in our use of clothespins.  We always overlapped an item with the previous one, and used one pin to hold both.  This also had rules.  You never hung a colored item with a white one.  You hung reds with reds, and all the other colors together.  Dante, and Milton haven't a clue as to what hell is like until you hang a red sock with one of daddy's white, dress shirts and it bleeds a pink spot onto it.  Hell smells like bleach as you scrub the stain out, and the odor is in your skin for days.

            It mattered not a hoot to my mother if it was freezing out, we hung the clothes anyway.  I think she preferred it.  On those days, I learned the phrase "freeze dried".  We would take the clothes off the line, shake them out to get rid of any ice crystals, and lay them neatly in the tubs to carry back in the house.

            Folding the sheets was mama's job, because we were not tall enough, but we were warned, "Your day is coming, watch how I do it," and it was magical.  The sheets were hung over the line length wise, and she would fold the sheet on the line back on itself, and continue to do so until it was a perfect, folded square, and it never touched the ground.

            Laundry day rules required that all the clothes be off the line, folded, ironed, and put away before dinner.  The pins were not to be left on the lines.  That was considered very tacky.

            Looking at a neighbor's clothesline was almost as good as looking through their window.  There were no secrets when you hung out the clothes.  If there were more sheets than usual, or they were out on a day other than Monday, mama knew someone was sick, and would take over some soup, and bring back a load of laundry for us to do.

            Diapers or tiny clothes announced the birth of a baby.  Hanging the fancy sheets and towels told that company was in town.  You could tell the ages of the children by looking at the clothesline, and mama, when house shopping, would always go on a Monday to find a neighborhood with children the same age as my sister and I.

            A bare line on Monday meant that the family was out of town.  When they came back, it was sagging with the weight of all the clothes dirtied while they were gone.

            I miss the clothesline…almost.  I don't miss the work, but I miss the tradition, and playing hide-n-seek, and tag, up and down the rows as mother struggled to hang stuff while we played.  It makes me smile and laugh to remember.  I also miss the smell of sun and wind dried clothes.  I loved to run head long into a dry sheet and take a deep breath as it wrapped around me.

But clotheslines now are of the past,

For dryers make work much less.

Now what goes on inside a home,

Is anybody's guess!

I really miss that way of life,

It was a friendly sign 

When neighbors knew each other best...

By what hung out on that line.

                                    Author Unknown