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         As a 60-something, I am appalled and mystified whenever I read some community has discouraged or banned hanging laundry outdoors.  For the land of the free, this seems a petty and ridiculous, not to mention environmentally disadvantageous, limit on personal freedom.  I was well into grade school before my mother had the option of giving up the dangers of a wringer washer and the inconvenience of hanging her laundry outdoors for the joys of an automatic spin washer and an electric dryer.  (Floating around our backyard in those days remained a zinc washtub and a rippled washboard, compared to which the wringer-washer had been a marvel.) She, of course, never looked back and sometime in the 1960’s dismantled our complicated apparatus for hanging laundry outside, but not before I had been imprinted with the magic of wandering through groves of sheets billowing in the wind.  When we learned at school that water evaporates even when it has turned to ice, our teacher reminded us that our mothers’ laundry dried in the winter, even as it froze!  (If you watch carefully, you will see Marjorie Main gesturing with a pair of frozen bloomers in the 1944 film Meet Me in Saint Louis as she takes laundry off the line while the children make snowmen.) Hanging laundry outdoors was universal, and no one found the sight of it offensive.  How did we go so off the rails?

         I myself took up hanging laundry as a graduate student studying in Germany, back before global warming was a popular concept much less a cause celebré.  The home I rented had a washing machine, but no dryer, so I hung my laundry on a line next to the washer and, despite the long drying time in that damp climate, I loved the results.  I, too, never looked back.  From then on I hung laundry in every apartment where I lived or in its basement.  I found hanging laundry, like cooking, calming and therapeutic, perhaps because both reminded me of the security of early childhood when mom was always at my side and my worst problem was having the snarls combed out of my hair.

         When my migrations took me to Hawaii, I quickly discovered that every dwelling in that sweet climate came with a laundry line—what luxury!  My boyfriend, also a recent transplant, was likewise seduced by the improvement air-dried laundry made in his clothes.  A big date was a trip to the laundromat, followed by hauling the heavy wet clothes back to hang on his lanai.  Eventually we married—clearly a match made in heaven!  Next stop, Japan: again we found most apartment dwellers owned a simple washing machine and hung laundry on their balconies.  (Traditionally, Japanese hung their clothes outdoors on poles threaded through the loose sleeves of their kimonos and similarly constructed garments.  That lovely sight has been immortalized by Yasujiro Ozu, whose films  often cut to such pole-hung laundry flapping in the breeze.)

         Except in Hawaii and Japan, I have, as an apartment dweller, always had to hang laundry indoors, not altogether bad since I avoid the inconvenience of inclement weather.  Imagine, though, the thrill of discovering our house in Charlemont came complete with a laundry line on a covered balcony.  Our clothes hang there unabashed to the amusement, I’m sure, of every passing driver.  I admit it sometimes gives our house a roguish appearance, never more so than back when the balcony’s peeling paint already made us look like a hillbilly encampment.  But there are days when the laundry’s bright colors against our new beige paint job create an enchanting composition, akin to the visual poetry Ozu extracted from drying clothes.

         For those who didn’t grow up playing hide-and-seek amid their mothers’ flapping sheets, hanging laundry may be more of a time-consuming chore than a pleasure, but those who embrace it from consciences stricken by a warming earth should be supported, not discouraged.  Notions of beauty can be reversed much more easily than climate change.