Hangin' Out The Clothes

Today is Monday, March 2, 2009. February has already gone by. Wow! It is a little cloudy today. It rained most of the day yesterday. Maybe the sun will come out today.
I talked about washing clothes and dishes in my last blog. And I've been thinking about the next step, hanging clothes out to dry. Mother taught me all she knew about that big job. We carried the bushel basket heavy with the wet clothes out into the side yard where our clotheslines were. This was at our 403 South Pleasant house. When we lived in our apartments, I don't remember helping much. But by the time we moved to Pleasant Street I was about 8 years old and big enough to help with most everything.
Anyway, out we would go with the bag of clothespins and the basket of wet clothes. The clothsline was four wires strung from a section of 2 X 4 attached to the side of the house to another section of 2 X 4 attached to a big tree about 20 feet away. First of all you had to wipe the lines with a damp rag. During the week the dust and dirt would collect on the wires and if you didn't clean them off, dark spots would get on the clean clothes where you hung them up.
We had two kinds of clothes pins in a cute little bag. It looked like a little girl's dress sewed together at the bottom and hung on a coat hanger to go along the line as you needed the clothes pins. (After I married Glen, I found out his mother just left the clothes pins on the line so she never had to use a clothespin bag.) We had more of the clipping kind of pins than we had of the two little post kind. Over the years we kept adding to the clip kind and finally the little post kind pretty much disappeared.
Okay, wipe down the line and then start hanging. On the outside line closest to the street was where we hung the sheets and towels and tableclothes. Of course, Mother wanted them all neat and straight to look quite nice blowing in the wind. They were hung on the outside lines so that underwear could be on the inside lines not to be exposed to everyone.
The sheets were thrown over the line and straightened at the sides and bottom. Towels were hung by the corners long ways. And you used as few pins as possible so you wouldn't run out. Dresses and blouses - since we had only women in our househould we had no shirts - were hung by the shoulders and made as straight as possible. All the dresses together, all the blouses together. Skirts were hung by the waistband, slips thrown over the line to the waist. (We never had any half slips in those days.) Socks, hung by the toe. It was quite a system.
When I was about 13 I read in a woman's magazine how to hang your clothes to cut down on the necessary ironing. I thought it all sounded so good. Sheets you were to hang by the edges. Dresses, blouses, and skirts (and men's shirts, if you had those) were to be hung by the bottom to prevent those little crease marks at the shoulders which were so hard to get ironed out. I thought these ideas sounded great and I decided I wanted to try them.
The next time I hung out the clothes I tried it. Well, it did not make my mother happy at all. It was just too different than she had ever done. She insisted that I hang the clothes the way she had taught me. However, over a period of time I did convince her that the new way WAS much better than the old. She didn't really like to iron anyway and before long she was happy that I had read the article and changed our pattern.
Even though the newer washing machines made washing day easier, there were still lots of years of hangin' out the clothes left for me.
I'll tell you sometime about my first automatic dryer. What a luxury!
That's all for this morning because Glen has breakfast ready for me. Bless his heart!