My mind has wondered to spring lately. Perhaps it's the cold and damp seeping into my bones making me think warmer thoughts.
Recently, I've revealed my love for farm and family and I've received positive feedback from my dear readers. Today, I will reveal a bit more of myself in the fact I love my clothesline. No joke.
I love everything about my clothesline. My dear daddy built it out of steel. My daddy can do anything. He was a steelworker and built it for my mother years ago when they lived on my great grandmother's homestead in a little community called Adger, Alabama. He welded the large pipes together and cemented it in the ground. When they moved from the old farmhouse, I inherited his handy work and I watched as he and my husband worked to set it up for my use.
It isn't prominently displayed in my yard, (it's out by the chicken pen), but I love walking out there during the spring and hanging out my wash the same way women for centuries have before me.
It's a very "green" thing to do. It saves electricity which equals saving money, it's healthier for each item of clothing not to be in the dryer, and the clothes smell fresh. It's not just for those reasons I hang my laundry.
The clothesline reminds me of how very dear my family is to me as I hang each and every item in a load of laundry. It has witnessed, throughout the years, the growth of my family from diapers to blue jeans and the arrival of my granddaughter when I painstakingly hung her freshly laundered cotton diapers just as I did for my own.
Oh, you say, she is so very old fashioned and maybe even simple minded.
Indeed.
Perhaps I am. But in my own defense, it's putting my hands to work and serve which makes me thrive.
I think of my mother washing our diapers and hanging them to dry and my grandmother and even my great grandmothers who would hang their kitchen towels and scrub their family's laundry by hand, in the midst of winter even, without the convenience of a front loading washer.
Thinking about the time it took to make sure their family not only had clean clothes to wear, but prepared healthy food to consume and served on a beautifully embroidered table cloth which she, herself, created. And washed and spilled jam on, which she made, possibly with strawberries from her garden.
Indeed.
Serving my family makes me smile, just as reporting the news in my home county puts me in the mindset of doing my very best. For you, dear readers.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Clotheslines, past and present