Irene Rawlings enjoys hanging out.
She likes the exercise in the trudge up from the basement of her home in Denver’s Highland neighborhood with a basket of heavy wet laundry. She looks forward to pinning the clean shirts, sheets and socks in orderly lines while her thoughts wander among the waving fabrics. She relishes collecting the dry clothes and burying her nose in an outdoor fragrance no “clothesline-fresh” dryer sheets can approximate. She even finds using the wind-stiffened towels “satisfyingly scratchy.”
That makes Rawlings, a magazine editor and co-author of a book about clotheslines, a throwback to another era when clotheslines were ubiquitous in backyards. It also makes her a vanguard. A movement to bring back the humble clothesline is building steam with the green-conscious and what could be called “pole huggers,” as well as with those who simply find clotheslines charming or thrifty.
But using clotheslines is no longer as easy as stringing a line in the backyard.
Sometime around the advent of disco-era polyester and the addition of washer/dryer combos in most homes, clotheslines fell out of favor. Pushing the button on the “wrinkle release” setting became so much easier than lugging laundry, racing thunderstorms and washing out bird droppings. And having one’s skivvies and patched overalls strung out for all to see was deemed unseemly and unsightly in upwardly mobile quarters.
“It became a flag of poverty over the past 30 or so years,” said Alexander Lee, founder of Project Laundry List. It’s a national organization promoting clothesline use under a quote borrowed from Benjamin Franklin: “We must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”
Some bans on outdoor drying
In response to the property-value-lowering connotation of clotheslines, a good number of the country’s 300,000 homeowner associations have covenants prohibiting or discouraging outdoor clotheslines along with items such as visible trash cans, open garage doors and basketball backboards.
The prohibitions have resulted in some clothesline controversies for those taking to heart home maven Martha Stewart’s pronouncement that clotheslines are making a comeback. The right to dry is being tested.
A Bend, Ore., woman is being threatened with lawsuits over a clothesline she strung in her upscale subdivision. Columbus, Ohio, raised a ruckus by banning clotheslines in its historic district. Poughkeepsie, N.Y., has started fining residents if they hang laundry anywhere but backyards. No more tea towels on the bushes or wet pants on banisters.
Clotheslines are out in a Wimberley, Texas, RV park; at adobe subdivisions in Santa Fe; and in shore developments in San Francisco. In Colorado, Crested Butte’s slopeside homes can’t have lines. There is no hanging out in several ’70s-era housing enclaves in Grand Junction nor in a newer subdivision in Longmont. Denver is a patchwork of clothesline-unfriendly developments.
On the other end, some states, including Florida and Utah, have nixed anti-clothesline rules. Ten states, including Nevada and Wisconsin, limit the power of homeowner associations to prohibit energy-saving systems. Clotheslines qualify as solar devices.
Colorado has no law upholding the right to hang out and no pressure to change that, according to the Colorado Office of Legislative Legal Services.
“I don’t think a lot of people who have the means to use a dryer are interested in stopping that,” said Frank Rathbun, a spokesman for the Community Associations’ Institute.
But Mark Payne, a Denver attorney who represents a number of homeowner associations, said clothesline restrictions are more common in older subdivisions than new.
“I would say that restriction is falling a little out of favor recently because of the environmental aspect,” Payne said.
Rawlings said she sees clotheslines in new high-end homes featured in her Mountain Living magazine, but they are often built into large laundry rooms. In restricted subdivisions, she also sees umbrella-type lines that can be folded up and removed from yards when the clothes are dry.
Easier to machine dry
Project Laundry List has the statistics to state why clotheslines make sense again in a society where recycling and conservation are buzzwords: There are more than 88 million dryers in the United States. They account for 6 percent of electricity consumed by U.S. households. Dryers are the second-biggest home power user after refrigerators. On average, they annually consume 1,079 watts per household and create 2,224 pounds of carbon dioxide. It costs the average household $80 a year to run an electric dryer.
“I recycle. I take my own bags to the grocery. I refuse to buy my veggies in plastic containers. We are building an energy-efficient house. And a few weeks ago, I thought, ‘Why on earth am I putting my clothes in a dryer?”‘ said Grand Junction resident Amy Nuernberg.
She rigged up an indoor clothesline out of old climbing rope and is going through her homeowner association for permission to put one outside.
Chad Filipski, a Buena Vista carpenter, also has combined recycling with solar drying. He built a clothesline out of old baling wire and made it so pins weren’t needed by running two lines together to hold the clothes snug.
Websites now sell all manner of clotheslines, and for clothesline aficionados, photographs depicting laundry flapping in exotic locations around the world.
And as with any re-emerging trend, there are accouterments – clothespins painted with inspirational messages, pin bags made of recycled children’s Hawaiian shirts and carved wooden bears that hug the poles. Clothesline activists can buy T-shirts with the message: “Hang Your Pants. Stop the Plants.”
And there are books like “Fine Lines: A Celebration of Clothesline Culture” and “The Clothesline” by Rawlings and Denver psychologist Andrea VanSteenhouse.
Project Laundry List boasts a collection of clothesline art and poems and essays extolling the joys of using a clothesline. The site urges neighborhoods to throw clothesline consciousness-raising parties, to celebrate National Hanging Out Day each April 19, to write their legislators to urge the easing of clothesline restrictions and to lobby their local TV weathercasters to give the drying forecasts each morning.
Cindy Souleret needs no convincing. She has been hanging clothes for most of her 45 years, first in rural Indiana and now in an older part of Colorado Springs where few yards sport flapping laundry.
“I enjoy it. I really do. I feel like a little pioneer woman,” she said. “I think if more people would try it, they’d love it too.”
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957or nlofholm@denverpost.com
