Recently I was thinking about the demise of clotheslines and some pleasant memories connected with them. It has been quite a few years since I have had an outdoor clothesline and asked my husband if he could put a single line out behind the garage. I do have a couple of clotheslines in the basement to use when some heavy towels or jeans don't quite get dry in the dryer. So far he hasn't installed one outside, not that it is so terribly important to me, but I suppose I had nostalgically imagined how nice it would be to occasionally hang out a quilt or some sheets. After all, I would have to haul the wet laundry up from the basement to hang them outside—probably more trouble than it would be worth.
When I was growing up, we spent the summers at Lake Beltrami near Bemidji, MN. Mom had a wringer washer outside. Water had to be heated on a stove so washing wasn't so easy. Sometimes we rinsed the clothes in the lake and we used a hand-cranked wringer mounted on the dock. We kids would wade out a ways and do the rinsing. Clothes couldn't be rinsed on a windy day because debris from the bottom would be churned up in the water near the shore but on calmer days the water was clear enough. Mom would look forward to “a good wash day,” sunny and not too windy. Clothes were hung from a long rope that was strung between the cabin and a tree near the lake. If there was a lot of wash, the clothesline would sag too close to the ground, so Mom used a long pole with a Y at the top to prop it up in the center. One time I recall that she and my grandmother hung out clothes on a very windy day and center pole and the line fell down three times. It was surely a struggle but they got quite a laugh out of it.
When I was a small child the clothesline with a blanket over it made such a cozy play tent. Also I recall a time as a ten or twelve year-old when I ran full speed ahead and ran into the clothesline which made a stinging wound across my nose. Ouch!
My husband Duane recalls that his mother hung out clothes in the winter on the farm and they would freeze. Pairs of jeans and long underwear would be stiff as if rigor mortis had set in. She would take them in and let the water sublime (evaporate from solid to gas) to dry in the house. The thought of this his makes one truly thankful for a modern clothes dryer!
I understand that in cities where people live in communities that have those homeowner's agreements, contracts usually prohibit painting one's home other than certain agreed-upon colors, hanging clothes out on a clothesline, etc. I suppose clotheslines could be could be an eyesore or cause a decrease in property values but Mom told me that in the old days there was a sort of etiquette to hanging out clothes. One would hang “unmentionables” (underwear—oops, sorry I mentioned them!) on the inner clothes lines and the sheets on the outside ones. Also the wash was supposed to be hung with all towels, shirts, etc. hung together in an orderly manner.
In Chadron, Nebraska, at one house in which we lived we had a fine clothesline with four or five lines held up by sturdy metal posts. I remember hanging sheets out in 90-100 degree heat in a stiff breeze and they would whip and snap violently in the wind. Summers were HOT there. The first sheets I had hung out would usually be DRY by the time the last ones were hung. Oh, what a clean ozone smell they had!
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The term “three sheets to the wind” comes to mind, but it has nothing to do with hanging the wash, I'm sure.
Phrase Finder says:To understand this phrase we need to enter the arcane world of nautical terminology. Sailors' language is, unsurprisingly, all at sea and many supposed derivations have to go by the board. Don't be taken aback to hear that sheets aren't sails, as landlubbers might expect, but ropes (or occasionally, chains). These are fixed to the lower corners of sails, to hold them in place. If three sheets are loose and blowing about in the wind then the sails will flap and the boat will lurch about like a drunken sailor.
The phrase is these days more often given as 'three sheets to the wind', rather than the original 'three sheets in the wind'. The earliest printed citation that I can find is in Pierce Egan's Real Life in London, 1821:
"Old Wax and Bristles is about three sheets in the wind."
Sailors at that time had a sliding scale of drunkenness; three sheets was the falling over stage; tipsy was just 'one sheet in the wind', or 'a sheet in the wind's eye'.
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