The Seattle spring is beginning to offer an occasional sunny day. You know what that means–Tangled Nest readers are bracing for my seasonal “It’s Time to Start Hanging Your Clothes Outside” lecture. Instead, let’s all put our feet up and enjoy a little break courtesy of The Colbert Report: “The Enemy Within–Backyard Clotheslines.”
The Colbert Report
Mon [...]
Tags: clotheslines
About a month ago, I called my friend T who, like me, is something of a clothesline evangelist. With the rains coming and school starting, I had fallen way behind on my laundry, and finally did about four loads in one day. I popped them all in the dryer. “Oh my god,” I told T, [...]
Tags: clotheslines, energy use
Of course you can hang your clothes any way y’all please, and they will still dry. But I love the traditions and arcana of homekeeping. Our mothers and grandmothers and our grandmothers’ mothers all learned particular ways to line-dry their laundry, and many of their methods result in better-looking clothes (no Pointy Shoulders!), speedier drying [...]
Tags: clotheslines
Tom and I have differing clothesline philosophies: I want a permanent line in the backyard, he doesn’t. My ideal line would involve the classic t-shaped wooden beams at each end, strung up as trellises to grow beans. Tom doesn’t like how they look, and thinks a permanent structure would take up too much space. Our [...]
Tags: clotheslines, energy use
My mother-in-law told me that clotheslines are against the law in Salem, Oregon, where she lives. I checked it out, and it’s true! Clothesline bans persist in many US cities, and parts of Canada and Europe. Thousands of homeowner associations prohibit line drying, including the 55+ community where my own dear parents live. Hmm. Clothes [...]
Tags: clotheslines, energy use, laundry
Yesterday I was out hanging clothes on the sunny line as the crows in the neighbor’s Douglas fir worked on their nest. So I just had to share this image from my new book, Crow Planet. Amazing local artist Dan Cautrell created gorgeous lino-cuts for each chapter. This one is called “Dwelling,” and I think [...]
Tags: clotheslines, crows, urban nature
Last summer the three of us traveled in Kenya and Tanzania for two months. Our first stop was a volunteer stint at Colobus Trust on the coast of Kenya, where we worked on Colobus monkey conservation, and lodged in the organization’s simple rooms. Our packs were light, with few extra clothes, and it was the [...]
Tags: clotheslines, energy use, laundry
