Pleasures of the Clothes Line

Better than a mechanical dryer, and versatile!

Some things about our clothes line:

• It dries better than a mechanical clothes dryer. Clothes acquire a nice outdoor smell in addition to being dried.
• Organization is helpful; the line is slower than a mechanical dryer, but if you plan ahead and do laundry before you need it, that's not a factor. We do have a mechanical dryer as backup (and because sometimes you want to air-tumble some items, e.g. the cats' favorite blankets).
• Old-school wooden pins (with a metal spring) work as well or better than modern plastic pins. We won't throw away the plastic, but they break over time and we won't replace them except with wood.
• IKEA "Squidden" is a plastic gadget with eight arms (why isn't it an "octopussen"?) each of which has two clips. It dries a week of socks at once and hangs conveniently from one arm of our umbrella-style clothesline.
• Ordinary coat hangers to dry shirts hang neatly on the clothes-line's arms; when done, they go straight to the closet. This means no time wasted folding! If folding 5 shirts takes 5 minutes, that's about 250 minutes a year saved, or about half a work day.
• Primroses planted around the bottom of the clothesline never have to be mowed, are forgiving if I accidentally step on them, and look great! To make room for their roots, I poured the cement plug supporting the line a couple of inches lower than the lawn surface.
• A pleasant couples experience is hanging the laundry and taking it in together. Like playing cards or  doing other chores together, it's a task-oriented activity that leaves bandwidth for conversation or for silence together.