Yesterday was a perfect laundry day-the sun was shining, a slight breeze blowing as butterflies danced around the backyard flowers.
it was only a year ago since our family began a concerted effort to forgo the dryer and go back to letting Mother Nature do the drying for us. While the dryer had afforded us the convenience of doing a quick load at any hour its days were numbered when I learned the true cost of that convenience. According to Alexander Lee, a lawyer and clothesline activist from my native N.H. using a clothesline and washing with cold water saves the average family 15% of their annual energy costs. Lee started Project Laundry in 1995 to promote the benefits of hanging clothes to dry. Fifteen percent of my electric bill was enough of a benefit for me to bring out the post hole digger and set up some line.
So with some grumbling from the kids I started drying all our clothes on a solar clothes dryer . The electric dryer still sits in the utility room though it now has a few boxes piled on it. Occasionally, we use it when we have a string of rainy days or one of the kids remembers at dinner that they need a certain shirt for school the next day. And my teens have now discovered that the triangular device with a handle and a cord sitting on the utility room shelf has a use. It is great at removing wrinkles in their favorite jeans. My seventeen year old son has even become quite the expert at pressing a shirt.
As for myself, I have rediscovered the joy of folding a basket of sun-dried clothes freshened with Mother Nature's scent. The smell of fresh laundry straight off the line-that alone will keep me forever a clothesline gal. Few simple pleasures reap such rewards.
