By NANCY JANE KERN
IF YOU RIDE around the countryside nowadays something is missing, the clothesline. We didn’t think much about it; everyone used one. Old photographs of tenements in New York City would show many clotheslines crisscrossing the backs of the buildings, and clotheslines were definitely in the country when I was a kid. There was no alternative but to hang out the wash. In fact, it was something we learned at a young age. This was particularly true for a farm family because being outdoors and getting dirty was unavoidable.
I don’t ever remember being without dirt by the end of an active day. Probably the worst thing I did was ride my horse bareback (without a saddle) and I rode every day unless I was sick. It was warmer to do this in winter and easier than saddling up. The problem was that the blue jeans I always wore were in sad shape when I came home. They would be coated with horsehair, and mud, and stiff from horse sweat. Sometimes there was manure, grass stains, or blood depending on what calamity had occurred. It never occurred to me what I was doing to my poor mother.
As I got older, I helped hang the clothes for her and my grandmother. They both had the old ringer washers, and my mother was fortunate to have a new, white, Easy brand washer. With hired hands, there were 6-8 people in the house who needed laundry done. There was so much that my mother had two rope lines on pulleys that went from the porch to two big maple trees at the end of the lawn near the road. My father would treat the narrow dirt road with oil or calcium so dust wouldn’t blow onto the clothes. Later the town road crew would do this. Monday was the traditional wash day, and it went on for the whole day. I learned to hang the clothes so they had minimal wrinkles and were arranged so like items were next to each other.
There were lots of rules for hanging clothes and it was easy to drop the wooden clothespins over the porch railing and down to the lawn. These had to be retrieved or there weren’t enough for the whole wash. It was necessary to use one clothespin to hold the corner of one item and the corner of the next one. If it was a calm day, it wasn’t too bad. If it was windy this was another challenge, and if the wind took a sock or shirt, we were off to the lawn again. As clothes were added we reeled out the line to have a space for the next item. You had to take a good look at the line to see if it was clean because our numerous birds loved to perch on them and sometimes left unwanted gifts. They sometimes left them on clean, dry clothes and it was really bad if they were eating colored fruit and berries.
For my first lab job, I had to wear white uniforms, and I will never forget reeling in the line to find a big purple blotch on a white skirt. We added bluing to some whites to make them whiter and a good advantage of a sunny day was brighter whites bleached by the sun. It didn’t matter how bad the weather was, we hung the wash and tried to work around the weather to get dry clothes in before storms. In winter we sometimes put up lines on our big porch. That was fun because although most of the moisture evaporated, there was enough to leave them frozen stiff. Then we would bring in the board-like clothes and dry them by the wood stoves. Wind occasionally blew down a line which was a disaster. If the grass or snow was clean, they could be re-hung. If not, we washed it again. My mother watched the condition of the lines, and if the cotton line was getting frayed and old she would get my father to replace them. If you could see the neighbor’s clotheslines you could tell the ages of children, if there were babies, and sometimes people commented on how clean the wash was, or the type of clothing of the family. There were few secrets, and the unmentionables might be hung indoors or hidden in the middle of the lines. Now I use my HE washer and the clothes go into the dryer, the appliance responsible for the demise of the clothesline. Life is easier, but I miss the glorious smell of the wash freshly brought in from that clothesline. Photo contributed
