Posted on 09/18/2007 10:23:19 PM PDT by HarryCaul
BEND, Ore. -- It was a sunny, 70-degree day here in Awbrey Butte, an exclusive neighborhood of big, modern houses surrounded by native pines.
To Susan Taylor, it was a perfect time to hang her laundry out to dry. The 55-year-old mother and part-time nurse strung a clothesline to a tree in her backyard, pinned up some freshly washed flannel sheets -- and, with that, became a renegade.
...
"This bombards the senses," interior designer Joan Grundeman says of her neighbor's clothesline.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
For some weird reason, she had a washing machine but no dryer. It drove me crazy. In the winter she would dry clothes on one of those folding, finger pinching wooden racks by draping the clothes over it and placing it next to a radiator (if I should be so lucky as to actually have the heat turned up above freezing!). My shirts came out looking like they had been pressed on jail house bars.
And they were stiff and scratchy. I hated it. I would wash my clothes, put them in a plastic bag and then drive them 15 miles to a laundromat. So much for the “environment”. I like my clothes soft and unwrinkled and tumbled in a dryer like God intended them to be. With a nice sheet of Springtime Fresh scent Bounce.
She was a vegetarian also. Wouldn’t allow me to cook meat in the house. No microwaves allowed. Had to heat the milk for coffee in a pan on a stove lit with a match. For this and many other reasons, we are no longer together.
The sex must have been great in order for you to even let her in the house!
There must have been a reason you put up with her lunacy for as long as you did.
Taking N.I.M.B.Y. to the next level.
N.I.Y.B.Y.E.
Perhaps it was my lunacy?
Well, actually, that wasn’t so hot either.
Who says relationships always have to make sense?
Live and learn. The hard way.
It costs the typical household $80 a year to run a standard electric dryer, according to a calculation by E Source Cos., in Boulder, Colo.,
If it really does only cost $80 a year to run the dryer, I'd say that is an absolute bargain.
I used to think, maybe I should hang clothes out once in a while. Then I saw these figures claiming that it was only costing me $80 a year, and I thought, why bother?
I have lived in Japan for 20 years without a dryer. Hanging clothes outside is what everyone does. If the weather is too damp, I take them to the coin laundry to dry. Actually I prefer that because the towels come back softer, but it’s time consuming and expensive.
But heck, am I the only person who remembers the fun of playing hide and seek with other kids while Mom hung the washing and screeched at us to keep our muddy fingers off the clean sheets?
Another part of Americana childhood lost it seems.
“the fun of playing hide and seek with other kids “.
No, I remember that too. I also remember getting “closelined” by running throught those hanging clothes. Hence the expression.
I could and would never live in a neighborhood with such strict covenants that a clothesline is not allowed. Good grief, that is what the sunshine is all about...making those sheets smell like no dryer every could. But, your normal everyday laundery...now that is a different story. I can’t stand jeans that have line dried...that is just like trying to put on a piece of cardboard.
My dryer quit for a week or so this summer and I don’t have a clothesline. So, the clothes were draped over the deck railing and the unmentionables were discreetly draped over my wicker deck furniture. I bet that made the neighborhood look real classy...haha
I support her property rights, which include doing damn near anything... like hanging her clothes outside.
If it lessens the neighbors’ property value, then they made a bad investment. Tough luck.
We were so poor that after walking to school up hill through the snow (5 miles) and back home again all the way up hill... I slept standing up with my brothers over a clothes line stretched across the room. Wake-up an hour before dawn to milk the cow and prepare gruel and bread crusts for breakfast.
Well, that part can stay lost, along with hand cranking your car engine and shoveling coal into the basement furnace. I like my electric dryer just fine.
I remember my mother building a fire so she could heat the water she drew from the well on laudry day.
:)
“in May, she heard an environmental lawyer on the radio who “talked about this narrow window of opportunity for us to respond to global warming,” Ms. Taylor recalls. “I said, ‘Dang it, that’s it. My clothesline is going up.’ “
Narrow window of opportunity? Hanging clothes out to dry to save $80 per year, i.e., the cost of going to Starbucks about twice a month? This isn’t an expression of common sense and frugality. It’s a kind of religious impulse, operating on the ‘principle’ of sympathetic magic. Eco-cranks are following the same puritanical path previously trod by all sorts of self-flagellants. In small numbers, they can be amusing for their earnestness and industry. Given any amount of political power, however, they quickly become remarkably petty tyrants, e.g., the recyclying nazis of Seattle.
Sounds like an Al Gore utopia. You’re lucky she didn’t have you digging up “fresh” carrots from the frozen garden with a pick ax and dynamite in the middle of winter.
“I support her property rights, which include doing damn near anything... like hanging her clothes outside.”
Finally a voice of reason, thank you. I was beginning to think this thread was full of greenie panty-wastes.
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