The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

Like most boys growing up in Ohio in the ’70s, I was obsessed with football. As one of the least athletic humans ever born, I knew there was no way I would ever be able to play the sport on a meaningful level, but that didn’t stop me from slinging the ball around my backyard. Sometimes when my nephews visited, I had live targets, but I was usually just throwing to lawn  chairs I had set up to simulate receivers or kicking field goals off a tee. I even had a “stadium” of sorts. My mother’s clothesline was strung from six-foot telephone poles planted in the ground in a rectangular pattern. The narrow ends, which were maybe 10 feet apart, served as both the goal line and the goal post, and the long sides, which were probably 30 feet, served  as the field.  

Now, you might be thinking, that’s a pretty expansive clothesline, but it got a lot of work. There was rarely a dry day in the summer when some batch of clothing or linens wasn’t hanging from those lines. Of course, we had an electric dryer, but mom preferred hanging our laundry outdoors whenever possible, except for underwear. Mom NEVER hung underwear up outside. 

It’s been 35 years since I’ve put on a line-dried shirt or slipped between sun-warmed sheets, but I can still recall the fresh smell and crisp feel. No dryer sheet can ever imitate that wonderful fragrance. And as an added bonus, the microscopic gypsum particles that floated in the air from the factory down the road added a powdery freshness (or so we chose to tell  ourselves). 

Janet’s and my first house had a small clothesline in the backyard, but we used it more for tying out the beagle than for drying clothes. The neighborhood where we live now actually prohibits drying clothes in the yard. There’s “progress” for you.

Of course, there were some downsides to line-drying. You would occasionally wind up sharing your bed with a spider or bee. Birds would sometimes “assist” with the process, requiring the item to go back into the wash. And clothes came off the line stiff and with some wrinkles. But that wasn’t really a problem since mom was a compulsive ironer. She ironed EVERYTHING. A few weeks into our marriage, Janet found me at our apartment-size ironing board and asked me what I was doing. “Ironing my jeans,” I said, as though it were the stupidest question I’d  ever heard. 

Hanging clothes outside to dry was not all fun and games, though. In family lore, it even had a sinister side. My grandmother believed that dreaming about hanging laundry or laundry blowing in the wind was the harbinger of death. She claimed to have had such dreams before the passing of my grandfather and her youngest child, my Aunt Sophie. A more common  interpretation of the hanging clothes dream is that dreaming about hanging clothes on a line – especially if the clothes you are hanging are underwear garments – indicates you may reveal hidden aspects of yourself to someone. Hanging clothes out could also suggest that you are taking your time to fix or address something.