[AT] Remembering Mom's Clothesline OT

[Chuck Bealke]

On 2/13/2012 5:48 PM, Mike Sloane wrote:
> In our township there is a "gated private community" of several
> thousand. In the "covenants", residents are specifically forbidden to
> hang laundry outside. I guess it is considered too "middle class" for
> the gentry.
>
> It seems to me that cleaning the clothesline was only necessary if you
> lived near where the trains came through. And if you did, you had to
> make sure the laundry was taken in before the train passed, or they
> would be covered with soot. Another problem was smoke and soot from coal
> fired home boilers in the winter. I don't recall how we dealt with that
> problem.
>
> Mike
>
> On 2/13/2012 6:13 PM, Dave Rotigel wrote:
>> Remembering Mom's Clothesline Author unknown
>>
>> You have to be a "certain age" to appreciate this one. I can hear my
>> mother now.
Y'all,

What I miss most about clothes lines is the marvelous smell of backyard 
dried sheets when
you went to sleep on them.  Line dried tee shirts smelled great too. 
Sheets waving from a line
in a summer breeze had a strangely calming effect - the epitome of 
domestic tranquility.   I have seen the
same sight from my youth in modern times in Amish areas.
Also remember that you never wanted to position a clothes line in any 
area with a mulberry
tree and that when the wind blew very strong from the southwest when a 
visiting car or truck came
zipping in our gravel road, we might get a little road dust on damp sheets.
That did not happen often enough to move our lines before we got the 
road paved.  Seems
like we kids would occasionally help mom scramble to get sheets and 
clothes down when she saw a storm
coming.  On clear windy days, the wind could move a big line of sheets 
enough that it would occasionally
free the line from a wooden prop pole and let the sheets drag the 
ground. The cotton line (thin
rope) never seemed to really stop stretching.
Never did like straight clothes pins as well as those with a galvanized 
spring to squeeze the
ends together.  Part of boy training was learning to take apart a 
squeeze one, fasten the ends of
the two wooden pieces together with adhesive tape and reposition the 
spring so that the device would
neatly light and launch a kitchen match about eight feet in a flash.  
That device was very handy
when lighting a damp brush pile doused with gasoline to get it started, 
though valid uses of the fire
starters were probably fewer than fun ones.

Chuck Bealke
Dallas