There is just something about clothes hanging on a clothesline. The smell of your clothes when you wear them just has a smell of freshness that you can’t get any other way. I hang clothes on the line as soon as the weather is warm enough and probably put them out twice a week until November if it is possible. Today I had a lady point to the clothesline, not knowing what it was called and asked me, “Do you use this?” She thought it was pretty neat that I did and it definitely seems to be a thing of the past. I love how the clothes blow in the breeze and the feel of the damp clothes as I hang them up. The stiffness of the dried jeans just adds an extra crunch as you put them on, but I try to throw them in the dryer the next morning to help soften them up.
My mom didn’t have a dryer that I can remember for a long time. I remember helping her hang up clothes all the time. I was in charge of washing the white clothes with the wringer washer and my sister Sue did the colored clothes. My Mom always told us stories about someone getting their arm caught in a wringer washer so we were extra careful with that. I remember losing tons of buttons as I would feed the clothes carefully through the wringer because it would work them loose, pop them off the threads or break the buttons.
Even after I was married we set up the wringer washer you see up next to the house in the picture, we set it up on the back porch during the summer and I used a garden hose to fill up the washer, and would have my daughters help feed them through the wringer. It worked especially well for the manure covered chore clothes and the big blankets I didn’t like washing in my newer washing machine. Even though these machines would last longer and did a good job, the newer machines are definitely safer and spin a whole lot better depending on how new you go, my favorite are the whirlpool top loader machines from probably the 90’s where you can open them any time you want.
Whenever the grandkids are here I have them help me hang up clothes. They pull the clothes out of the baskets and hand them to me so I don’t have to bend down. Even when I ran my daycare the kids would walk with me over to Grandma Mortimer’s clothesline and help me hang up the clothes. Many clothes would get dropped on the ground so I’d shake them off and hang them up. Kids love to walk through the clothes and to feel the damp coolness of the clothes on a hot day, but I didn’t like them doing so because they would pull them off the line.
Grandma Mortimer used the clothesline more then I did, she kept the lines tight and always had her clean clothes waving on the line. She had her raspberry patch just on the other side and spent a lot of time bent over the raspberry bushes with her bucket tied around her waist and her sunbonnet on. I was so busy all the time I do remember many times that she would take the clothes off for me if it looked like rain.
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