There's a delightful blog I follow written by two ladies in Iowa (The Iowa Housewife) and this morning the post was a picture of a line of clothes hung outside in a cold, blustery, snow-filled back yard.
Oh, the memories. Back in the days before I had a clothes dryer in the house, I did hang my clothes outside year 'round. The biggest hurdle in the winter I found to be finding gloves (mittens were much too clumsily frustrating) to wear so that my hands didn't suffer frostbite. (A goal never quite reached.)
The first several years we were married, I took our laundry to the local laundromat. (Ugh, I hated that.) Then around 1970, we moved and rented what was the ground floor of an old farmhouse that had been remodeled into a lower and upper apartment. (When I say this farmhouse was old, I mean it. The original part of the structure had been built as a stagecoach stop.)
Mrs. Rector, our lovely 80-some year old landlady, lived in the apartment upstairs and kindly told me I could use the clothes lines in the back yard to hang our washed clothes. (I did have a washer then, but no dryer.)
This was back in Illinois and many days in the winter, the temperature stayed below freezing. If there was sun and a breeze, the clothes dried better than you might think. But many times, at the end of two (or three) days, everything would still be frozen and I would give up and bring the laundry inside to drape over every surface possible to thaw and finish drying.
Dear Mrs. Rector, being of the old school when many babies didn't survive infancy, repeatedly warned me that bringing in all that cold, frozen laundry would lower the temperature of our living space and I needed to be very careful that my then infant daughter didn't "catch cold."
I do remember awkwardly bringing in sheets that were frozen stiff and felt like the sails of an ocean-going vessel.
In the area at that time there were many farm auctions and we frequently attended them. At one we purchased (for $7.00) a large, wooden, folding clothes rack which I used in the winter to hang as much of the laundry inside as I could. That helped the situation a lot.
That rack was made rock-solid and I still have it (some fifty years later) and used it once again earlier this winter when our gas dryer went on the fritz and wasn't usable for three weeks. That rack is one piece of household equipment with which I'll never part.
Were those times the good old days? In many ways, yes. Nothing wrong with a little challenge (little, perhaps, being the operative word) and knowing you can successfully bring self-sufficiency into play. Plus, there's something about seeing laundry hanging out on the line by a house that makes it all feel lived in, efficient and cared for.