Tomorrow is National Hanging Out Day

Hanging out laundry, that is. Project Laundry List is leading the way to bring back the old-fashioned, energy-saving method of drying your laundry...hanging it out on clotheslines!

I love "laundry art" and have this print and
some old aprons hanging on a line to decorate
my (uglyish) basement laundry area.

In my family, this tradition has never died. My grandma always hung out her laundry and my mom also hangs out much of her laundry and did so even when she was a full-time working mom. In fact, when we moved from a small town to a suburb of Minneapolis in 1978, one of the first things my mom did was have heavy-duty steel laundry poles and lines installed along the boundary of our big new backyard.

I even like to collect antique laundry
paraphernalia at garage sales and the like...

Keeping with this tradition of my foremothers, I love love love to hang out my laundry. I find it meditative to be out there under the sun, carefully hanging out each piece of my family's newly cleaned clothing or bedding. Not sure why I love it so much, but I do and I suspect my mom must have too which is why she insisted on getting laundry lines at our new home way back when. It is peaceful and quiet out there under the clotheslines. Time seems to stop, even, as I do this work. And then there's the smell of fresh, line-dried laundry when it's time to take it in. There is nothing so pleasant as crawling into bed the first night after the sheets have been washed and hung out to dry, and the bed has been crisply re-made.

Whenever I've been able, I've also hung out my laundry. George and I had no dryer when we were first married and living in small town Iowa. But our house did come with a clothesline and I happily used it. Before we got a washing machine, we'd go do all the wash at the laundromat and then come home with heavy baskets of wet clothing which would all get hung on the lines at once--an entire week's worth of laundry. I remember women at church commenting that we had so.much.laundry. But, I only did that once a week. Maybe they didn't notice that part...

When I can't hang my laundry outside, I hang it inside.
This rack was left in our first home in Cresco, Iowa.
We've had to repair it some, but it's still going strong...

Subsequent homes have had various laundry lines. At our last house in a small Minnesota town, I happily borrowed the neighbor's lines on the days they were working. Two different neighbor ladies had seen my plight of no clothesline and made the offer. Go figure. I think ours was the only old house in town that didn't have a line; many of them had heavy-duty upside down U-shaped steel poles that held literally ten lines each. This was a traditionally Catholic town here in Central Minnesota, where only a generation ago families of ten or more children was the norm!

Now that we live "in town" on a very small city lot, that also (amazingly for Minnesota) didn't come with a clothesline, we purchased one of those one-pole, umbrella-type clotheslines at the local Mills Fleet Farm store. It's not as sturdy as some, and I can't hang my sheets out down a long row, but it works just fine and doesn't take up the whole back yard.

Consider hanging out your laundry. The clothes dryer uses a significant amount of enery and as of now there are no Energy Star standards for them. Many cities and even states like Colorado and the entire province of Ontario are now bringing back clotheslines by making it illegal for Homeowner's Associations (HOAs) to ban them. This is great news for people like me who love to Hang Out!