Some time ago I did a series on the new 3Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle. The highest, the most desirable, and the hardest thing to achieve is downsizing. But one of the things that I promised to do to reduce was to buy a clothesline and hang the clothes. I thought I’d give you an update on that project.

In April, we found a relatively sturdy and inexpensive coat rack at our local store (less than fifteen pounds). Of course, the month of May was so rainy that I didn’t get to use it much. But so far this month, it’s working wonderfully. Last week, I washed about six loads of laundry. I have dried only one of those; all the others were air-dried.

Actually the whole thing reminds me a lot of my youth. I don’t remember us ever having a dryer. Instead, we had a clothesline that consisted of three nearly six-foot-tall poles cemented into the ground. It was much longer than anything I have seen in the UK. Since our house was on about a half acre of land, we had plenty of room for this thirty-foot-long contraption. If those dimensions are mind-boggling enough, it actually had three lines. So we had almost a hundred feet of room to dry our clothes.

This was especially meaningful to me because it was my job to bring the laundry inside at the end of each day. After I did my homework and before dinner, I’d grab a basket and head to the clothesline. The huge bag of clothespins always remained hanging from the center post. I would remove item by item from the pins, fold them, and place them neatly in the basket. On a good day it might take me about ten minutes or less. But if my mom or Nanny had washed the sheets or towels, it could take almost half an hour to fold everything that dried in the hot South Carolina sun on those hundred feet of clothesline. It may sound romantic or nostalgic now, but at the time for a sixteen year old girl it was anything BUT.

Of course, there are a couple of challenges to line drying. First of all, my husband has extreme allergies. Since line-dried clothes will pick up pollen outside, much of the gas drying we still do is his clothes. The other big drawback is that almost everything now has to be ironed. But the energy used to run the iron for a couple of minutes is still significantly less than running a gas dryer for almost two hours. The estimated cost of drying a load is between fifteen and forty pence. Of course, that doesn’t count the real cost to our environment. I guess in a way we are using solar and wind energy to dry our clothes.

Of course, our simple clothesline is nothing compared to that hundred feet of clothesline. Thank God for that.