Recent letters and lifestyle articles in the local rag have extolled the practical and karmic virtues of using a clothesline to dry laundry, rather than an electric- or gas-heated automatic clothes-dryer. The proponents need to think a bit more about what century they’re in.

This is not the 1950s, when June Cleaver and all the other Moms reserved Monday as wash-day in their clean, spacious suburbs. Hanging that laundry on clotheslines, they were at home all day to haul it back in. During the short time it hung in the breeze, that breeze was relatively clean (most places). We had a fraction of the population, a fraction of the number of cars, and a fraction of the number of airplanes. Most airports were on the far outskirts of cities. Laundry could actually come in from outdoors looking and smelling fresh.

These days, laundry that goes out in the morning stays out all day, until Mom and Dad return from their jobs.  While it languishes, what it absorbs is anything but “freshness”.

Cities are far bigger than they were five decades ago. More roads carry more tailpipes spewing combustion products. Far more tires abrade themselves and the asphalt roads into dirty, greasy powder that hangs in the air, then settles on our windows and deck-chairs. The former outskirts of our cities have engulfed the busy airports. Planes arrive and depart in ceaseless droves, flying low over homes as they do so. Today’s bigger, heavier planes use their richest throttle settings to get off the ground, expending that fuel over houses rather than over empty fields of half a century ago. It falls as additional black soot. Never-ending construction churns dirt and dust through our streets.

Until the suburbs crush the last of the farmland, each spring will bring the waft of fermented animal excrement and other less savory chemical concoctions sprayed on the remaining farm fields. The neighbor has a bird-feeder in his tiny yard - laundry in my tiny yard might shield my deck and barbecue from bird-poop, perhaps.

All of that natural and man-made poop mocks any claims of “outdoor fresh” laundry. I think I prefer the dry that comes from my machine. It might not be “fresh”, but it’s relatively clean.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2008