Dryers and clothes lines

The dryer in my grandma's kitchen was also her pantry.  It was full of boxes of crackers, bags of chips, and assorted cookies.  I don't know if she ever used the dryer for clothes, because there was so much food in the drum that it would have been a chore to clean it out for a load.  Her kitchen was tiny with just a couple of cabinets and nowhere to store much, so the dryer doubled as a pantry.  The washer and dryer stood sentinel against the wall across from the stove and just down from the fridge with their tops doubling as counters.  It wasn't odd for me to see the washer and dryer in the kitchen or to open up the dryer and grab a bag of Munchos.  It was just Granny's house.

She often had her blouses and pants hanging to dry in her bathroom on the shower curtain rack, and she had a drying rack in her back bedroom for smaller items.  I think I remember a clothes line in the back yard, but it's like a dream, so while I'm guessing she had one, I can't say for sure.

We had a clothes line pole in the side yard at our house when I was growing up.  It was about 5 feet square with concentric lines from pole to pole like a spiderweb.  There was a bag of clothes pins hanging on the line with both wooden and plastic clothes pins in it.  My mom would often hang our clothes on the line during the summer, and I can remember going out and pulling things off the line when the weather would turn and rain threatened.

My favorite thing dried on the line was our sheets.  We all had twin beds, and if we folded the sheets in half, we could get one on each of the outer lines with the fitted sheet on the second line in.  I can see those rainbow and flowered sheets dancing in the wind on that square clothes line.  They were like walls and almost made a little house, and I used to secretly walk between the sheets like they were a maze.  I loved the smell of those sheets the day after they'd been dried on the line.  They were so crisp and so fresh.  They just smelled clean.

During my old fashioned phase (which has never actually ended!), I used to wash my doll clothes by hand in a bucket and hang them on the line like I imagined Ma Ingalls doing on the prairie.  Tiny dresses and aprons, doll socks, and baby blankets dried in the sun while I pretended to be Laura gathering apples to put up for the winter.

I haven't had the occasion to dry clothes outside for a long while.  I really don't remember the last time I put anything outside besides my reenacting clothes, and then our dryer went out last week.  It ran through a cycle, and when I went to get the clothes out, they were still wet.  I ran it again.  Same thing.  After some investigation, I realized the heating element was bad, so I called a repair service.  Just to come out and take a look at it was $185.  To fix the 10 year-old dryer would cost about $400.  We could get a new one for just a little bit more than that, so I took myself down to Lowe's and got one.

There must have been a run on appliance purchases because it was going to be nine days before it could be delivered.  Nine days.  With no dryer.

I thought about going to the laundromat, and I still might, but we have a clothes drying rack for sweaters during the winter, so I decided to give it a whirl.  I brought the rack out to the patio and hung our clothes to dry.  It worked like a charm!  The clothes are not as soft as those dried in the dryer, in fact, the towels are downright scratchy. Everything is wrinkly and needs ironing once it's  dry.  But it's not been bad.  And the clothes smell so clean, just like I remember.