Homeowners associations, Condo associations and all the rest of these fascist, repressive, sanctimonious, self righteous groups
Suck Rocks Big Time.

I hate them nearly as much as I hate Commercial Banks and Insurance Companies.

I wish them all a slow painful death. After which they rot in hell for all eternity !!

C

We hang our laundry because it smells better and costs less.

I used to do projects in a carefully-controlled and self-styled new town. No antennas, no bird feeders, no storm doors, no vehicles with large lettering on the side were allowed, and all exterior renovation had to use the approved paint colors. I vowed at that time that I would *never* buy into such a situation.

Ramona:
My grandmother's garden was a sensory paradise, melding the breeze-laden scents of hollyhocks, dahlias, lilies, lilac, roses, fresh-cut grasses and.... bed linens hung on the line in the sun, ready to be folded, run through the mangle, refolded, unfolded on beds in bedrooms and sleeping porches, fresh linens to fall into after days spent in the sun, in the breeze, in the garden after a bath, dried by a towel that also snapped in the fresh air breeze......After that hedonistic experience, I once lived on a resort island where it was against the bylaws to hang anything, at all, outside to dry. So that in air saturated with the melded perfume of tea olive and salt water and pine straw it was necessary, instead, to throw everything into a dryer.
It was a sorrow, a sadness, until I discovered the Maritimes in Canada where it was not only acceptable, but expected, that one would hang everything outside to dry.
This photo has great personal meaning to me. As an ode to my gran and a testament to the goodness of clean linen washed and dried by clean air. Despite my more "civilized" upbringing, I hung this wheel and fed this clothesline myself and it was a simple, pure joy:
http://picasaweb.google.com/wwstaebler/MaritimeLaundry#

Thanks, Ramona, for helping me remember.

I haz a clothesline.

:)

It's hard enough for some of these repressed people to leave the lights on, how much harder is it for them to see someone else's undies hanging on the line?

My grandmother (born in 1901) used to do laundry on Mondays too. :-)

When she lived on a farm in Cottonwood County, Minnesota, she had no choice but to hang the clothes to dry outside. The farmhouse was very small, my grandparents were poor, and they didn't even have electricity until 1938, a few years after President Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act.

From my generation to hers, technology has come a long way very fast. So fast that people have apparently forgotten that hanging clothes was a simple fact of life because electricity was a luxury.

When my grandmother moved off the farm and into town in the 1970s, she continued to hang her laundry in the backyard. She never gave it a second thought; why would she? She took hanging clothes outside as a given like people now take using an electric clothes dryer as a given.

If we took the time to think about how our lifestyles got to where they are today, maybe some of our environmental issues would be easier to resolve. I bet that people a generation or two younger than I am would view hanging clothes outside as a "ghetto" thing to do.

Good post, Ramona. I wonder what other things that we used to do by hand that we now do inefficiently mechanically? I know that a dishwasher is probably one of them, but I'll take an energy star rated dishwasher over the endless handwashings that we have to do right now (our apartment has no dishwasher).

I bet that a dryer is the worst energy-waster outside of some inefficient furnaces and air conditioners. In NM, we use the old fashioned swamp-coolers (evaporative cooling) and, except for the couple of weeks every year where the temperature reaches the high 90s, it works wonderfully.