Dryers aren’t really a thing here – we’re unusual just for having one, and even then it’s not really the same experience as in the U. S. Our dryer is heat pump based, which is awesome – energy efficient, doesn’t require that annoying vent hose, just empty the water reservoir now and again. But it takes around three hours to dry a load of laundry. So we don’t.
Like most folks here, we hang our clothes in the fresh air. The clothesline is outside our kitchen window, with a thoughtful privacy screen of green slats to conceal our lacy unders from the passersby. And if they come in off the line hard (as the towels always do) or stiff (line-dried jeans can stand up on their own), we pop them in the dryer for a few minutes to soften up. Overall, it works.
But out clothesline was clearly designed by an architect who has someone else to do their laundry. The window is just under 2 meters wide. The clothesline is about 4 meters wide. Which means you can’t reach most of it. Oh, sure, you can slide the lines back and forth – but when the clothes on one side hit the wall, you can’t move it any farther. So in the end, a little over half that space is really usable. It’s a minor inconvenience until something goes wrong.
And things do go wrong.
A shirt that doesn’t want to come back to the window – its clothespins just slide along the line and keep it out of reach. A skirt that gets tossed by the wind and wrapped around all four lines – a meter or so beyond the window edge. A sheet that blows in the breeze and gets caught on the privacy screen all the way on the far end.
But it’s going to happen, and recently I bragged to my husband that I had become the Queen of Clothesline Recovery. From judicious line-shaking to free that skirt, to using a broomstick to hook that shirt, the clothesline has not beat me yet! I mean, I’m in trouble if the line actually breaks, because it’s gonna take someone with a big ladder to reach the pulleys, but other than that…
When will I learn not to say these things where the clothesline can hear me? Yup. It not only heard me, it decided to teach me a lesson.
While I was hanging laundry last week, the clothesline snapped. There I was, with a clothespin in one hand and my fingertips pinching a blouse to the line with the other, when half of my clothes dropped away to swing tauntingly a few centimeters from the far wall.
Well. OK then. I snatched the clothes off the side of the line that I was holding and tossed them unceremoniously onto the kitchen table. The line, thankfully, didn’t fall – its hardware was loosely stuck in the pulley, keeping it from coming unthreaded. Whew!
The other side of the broken line was too far away to reach. Off to grab my trusty broom handle! Alas – not quite long enough. But wait – it’s a set, with one of those standing dustpans on a pole. I disassembled the dustpan and added one of its sections to the broom. Success! I carefully brought the line back up, simultaneously keeping the clothes moving in my direction while trying not to pull the other end of the line hard enough to accidentally yank it out of the pulley. Success again! I tied off the loose end and hung the clothes on the outside line.
Now to figure out how to repair this thing.
I almost didn’t bother. I had mentally written the inner clothesline off until I could get the landlord to send someone with a big ladder. But once I had both ends of the line, I realized it hadn’t snapped. It had merely disconnected. Each end of the line is tied to an eyelet, and both of those screw into a center connector. One of the eyelets had apparently been barely screwed in, and had loosened under constant use.
So, all I needed to do was to get hold of that loose bit of hardware with the end of a broom handle, pull it downward without pulling it off the pulley, yank it toward me far enough to get hold of it, and reconnect it. And, oh yeah – the line is just long enough to make a continuous circle, but I’ve used several extra inches of it tying the other end off so it won’t fall again.
No problem.
It took about 30 minutes and a lot of colorful language but I managed it. Because I. Am. The QUEEN.
But – I’m not gonna say so where the clothesline can hear me.
