Clotheslines and Other Vanished Relics

Growing up in the 1950s was a rare privilege, I’ve decided. The mood was upbeat, everyone worked hard, and aside from the Cold War, there was a future. A sentinel on that landscape was the inevitable clothesline, as foreign to my grandchildren as mutt dogs who run loose. Most communities don’t allow them anymore, deeming them an eyesore, along with electrical wires and dirt roads. And I miss them.

Ours consisted of two Tees made of splintery wood, so weathered that even a foolish girl didn’t have to be told twice not to hang from the tops because her hands would be filled with splinters. Across the tops were rusty hooks, and around the hooks were several windings of rope, made bulky by continual rewindings as the ropes stretched. I think there were five hooks, and in my child’s eyes that clothesline was a mile long. It was a part of our back yard in the way the trees or the oleander hedge was.

In the cadence of the time, wash days were Tuesdays and Fridays, kept religiously because the schedules were as sacred as the roles parents played. My grandmother, Momo, gave herself the monotonous job of “hanging out the clothes”, a task my busy mom was glad to relinquish. Sometimes, on a very special day, taking notice of my hovering around the edges, Momo asked me to help her.

Long before I could reach the lines, she let me hand her the socks from her carefully-arranged basket. She thanked me each time, saying that it spared her the bending, but once I had kids I realized it was love that dictated that scenario, not ease. She had a bag of clothespins that she sewed, like an apron with one big pocket. (I tried it on once, and it weighed a jillion pounds.)

When Ron and I got married we did not own a dryer. I made myself a copy of Momo’s ingenious bag, and, looking ahead to children, ordered the heaviest-gauge-steel clothesline the Sears catalog offered. It worked well until the kids came along, three in three years. As the loads grew larger, the end pieces began to bow toward the ground, looking like two sad old women who just didn’t have the strength to hold on. Ron’s solution was to set the poles in larger and larger pools of concrete, which didn’t solve the problem; it just shortened the poles.

It was a sad day – a farewell of sorts – when we gave up, and I succumbed to the umbrella clotheslines of the 1970s, compact and neat in appearance, but less efficient. Gone were the lines of diapers, the sheets billowing in the wind, the gradually-bigger kids clothes.

And, of course, the rows of socks.