Hanging Out the Washing (part two)

by Ruth Wiechmann
(continued from part one)

What about the washing? Before dirty clothes are ready to hang on the line, they have to be washed first. In my world, clothes come in dirty. Two little boys can get dirty without trying, especially while reveling in the glorious mud of spring. My husband’s clothes meet the worst in his line of work in all seasons: cow manure, calf scours, diesel fuel, blue grease, gasoline, hydraulic oil, and, last but not least, dirt. My neighbor has told me that her mother-in-law once asked how she got her husband’s clothes clean, and his reply to her was, “She uses good soap.” It works. The only thing I can add to that is: use good soap and plenty of it.

Put liquid soap directly on the worst spots and let it soak in for 12-24 hours before washing. Add a product such as Borax or Oxi-Clean to cloth diapers to help eliminate odors. Add Oxi-Clean to any heavily soiled load. Soak food or blood stains in white vinegar; add ammonia to the”work clothes” load to help take out the grease and grime. Run the diapers for an extra rinse to be sure to get all the soap out; do the same for any load you pre-treated with extra soap.

Okay, so how soon will it be warm enough to hang the clothes on the line? I can’t say how soon–we’ve another blizzard in the forecast–but I can give you Mom’s rule of thumb for determining when to hang that first load outside. She made us wait until the thermometer said fifty degrees (Fahrenheit). Her reasoning? That’s approximately the temperature at which clothes will dry in one day, if you get them out early enough in the morning. If you don’t mind leaving them out overnight, you can hang them out in cooler weather. I have even hung clothes out in below freezing weather, but you’ve got to be either desperate or tough or crazy, or all three. My wringer didn’t take as much water out of the clothes as an automatic washer with a spin cycle, so allowing them to freeze-dry before hanging them indoors significantly reduced the puddles on the floor.

Mom’s only exception to her rule was for diapers. She wanted them sunbleached, regardless of whether they had any chance of drying or not. Once or twice each week, no matter the temperature, no matter if the diapers froze stiff before I pinned them to the line, the diapers went out. When I went out again to pull the clothespins off and unbend the stiff pieces of cloth from the wire, all but the worst stains were gone. After clunking round and round in the dryer for awhile, eventually softening and drying, we had a stack of snowy white diapers to return to the shelf. If, “Dewbleaching works wonders,” according to Mrs. Rachel Lynde, sunbleaching works better than Clorox.

One other factor to keep in mind: the wind. Maybe the wind doesn’t blow much where you live, but here in South Dakota I can pretty well count on the wind blowing when I hang clothes out. The wind will either take the wrinkles out, or put them in, depending on how you hang the clothes and how hard it’s blowing. The wind will either be your best aide, or else create chaos on your clothesline! Sometimes I question my sanity in trying to hold out against a twenty-five mile an hour wind with mere clothespins. There are days when I wonder if my clothes will end up in the next county, or at least in the neighbor’s fence, before they dry. I shove the pins down hard, well past the open place in the jaw, and if the wind is blowing really hard, I fold things like sheets smaller, so they have less surface area for the wind to catch.

As a general rule, the way you hang your clothes is the way they will dry. Fold sheets in half, then pin the open edges to the line, with the fold hanging down. Hang shirts by the hem, unless it’s very windy. In that case, or if you don’t have enough room on your clothesline, hang them by the collars. Hang jeans and skirts by the waist. Hang socks by the toe end–they dry fastest this way. Dishtowels can be folded in half vertically to save line space, if necessary. One other rule I always follow: hang delicate items somewhere on the line where they will not be immediately obvious to the passing world.

Hanging things in this way will allow the wind to shake the wrinkles right out of the clothes, leaving them soft and smooth. The sheets will already be folded in half, the shirts won’t need ironing, and if you fold things as you take them down, they won’t get wrinkled in the basket! Of course, there are the days when the wind is blowing hard, and the shirts get all wrapped around the line, and the jeans get jerked off into the grass, and the socks bunch together, and the best laid plans o’ mice and men and housewives “gang all a’gley.” But so be it. I unwind the tangles, shake the grass off the things that fell down, drape the things that are still damp over the back of a kitchen chair, and enjoy the fresh smell of the clothes anyway.

The smell? Well, it’ll make your labors all worthwhile. Your clothes will smell of spring air, of summer sunshine, of fall frosts. These beat any scented dryer sheets or fabric freshener all hollow. There’s nothing quite like crawling into a bed newly made up with clean sheets that smell like a prairie wind.

So, go for it! Hang out the washing! May your children say, every spring, what a former pastor’s kids said one spring many years ago: “Oh, Mom, now we get to have clean sheets again!”