Put it all on the line - laundry that is

By Theresa Curry

Correspondent

There was a time when every backyard told a story. No one needed a stork flag when diapers hung in a neat row on the clothesline, or a “My Brother is in the Army” bumper sticker when khaki pants were pinned, sharply creased, for all to see.  The props of daily existence are laundered in secrecy now, tumbled in the dryer and folded back into drawers and closets within hours of use.

But thanks to a growing movement, propelled by energy costs and environmental concerns, we may again see the humble flags of human life flying in the breeze. People everywhere are choosing clotheslines over dryers, wind-softening over dryer sheets and the purifying rays of the sun over chemical bleach.

Virginia Beach naturalist and wild food expert Vickie Shufer  has never owned a dryer, preferring to use the same forces that grow her food to dry her clothes.

“I do it year round,” she said. “If it’s even in the  40s and sunny, they’ll dry fine.” Shufer anchors heavy work clothes with an extra clothespin or two. If there’s an unexpected freeze while she’s away, she just brings the clothes in to thaw and finish drying. 

“I think they probably use a hundred different chemicals to get the 'fresh linen’ smell,” she said. “I get it naturally.”

Like Shufer, retired educators Joanne Belda and Martha Nielsen  are all-season wash-hangers. They share a house near the beach and have elevated laundry to an art form.

“I really like letting the sun and air do the job rather than paying Dominion Power,” Belda said.

It’s true that household dryers make the meters spin. The Department of Energy estimates clothes dryers account for almost 6  percent of your household energy bill. Clothesline advocates said that figure is low because it doesn’t include the gas dryers that 16  percent of us use. This makes the household dryer the second biggest (after the refrigerator) household energy hog.

Besides the savings, Belda and Nielsen like the time spent outside and the smell of the clothes when they bring them in. Both believe the coarser texture of towels dried in the sunshine actually makes them more absorbent. They also believe their clothes last longer and retain their shape better.

“We’re so into this clothes-hanging thing that when we had to move temporarily so our house could be rebuilt, we strung lines from trees and continued doing it, even though we had a dryer in our rental home,” Belda said.

The two women study the weather before doing the wash. Even so, they sometimes miscalculate.  “Once, it started to rain before we got home, and our neighbor ran out and took in the wash for us,” Nielsen said.

The two  said they don’t cave when temperatures remain in the 20s for days at a time: “We have five or six clothes racks, and we just dry them inside,” Belda said. “It helps humidify the house when the air gets so dry in winter.”

Shufer lives in the Blackwater  section of Virginia Beach,  where her socks and jeans are isolated from public view; Belda and Nielsen are screened by a garage. There are many places throughout the area, though, where clotheslines are prohibited because of the modern perception that they’re unsightly.  There are rarely city-imposed regulations against outside laundry: it’s neighborhood groups and condominium associations that are likely to impose these restrictions, said Alexander Lee,  an environmental attorney and executive director  of “Project Laundry List,”  a group dedicated to the clothesline movement.

Lee said that, of the 300,000 or so private home­owners groups in this country, about half prohibit clotheslines. He  embraced the “solar drying” movement when he was an undergraduate at Middlebury College in Vermont 13 years ago.

“A speaker told us that if we all hung our clothes out, we’d be able to do away with the nuclear power industry,” he said. “That struck a chord with me. Why not offer something substantial that everyone can do rather than complain and feel helpless?”

He began with his own dorm, where concerned students put their clothes on drying racks rather than using the dryers in the basement. Within a few years, he had a Web site, “Project Laundry List.” Last year, with the movement gaining exposure in national media, he quit his regular practice to concentrate solely on the work of his nonprofit organization, supported by donations and the laundry products sold on his Web site. Rather than taking on each of the 300,000 private groups, Lee and others in the “right to dry” movement have focused on asking states to pass laws prohibiting clothesline restrictions at any level. A few states – including Hawaii and Colorado –  have passed laws; others are considering them.

Meanwhile, he advises those with restrictions to challenge them politely and those without to be mindful of the aesthetics of their wash. “We encourage the tasteful, discreet hanging-out of wash,” he said. In the end, he said, the movement will prevail because of factors other than his efforts: “It’s the cost of energy and the growing concern about the environment, not me.”  

Theresa Curry, flavor@pilotonline.com