Hanging a Clothesline and Hanging Your Couch Backpacks

I live in upstate New York, where the winters could be extreme. When I have not yet hung clothes during a winter, my neighbors have. I intend to take advantage of the sunny time, while keeping a supporting rack by our wooden stove. As for who does the laundry, it looks like it is an issue that it has to be answered family by family, with a fit doubt of all inherited gender-coding.

It has been two months from the time when I did it: I hung a clothesline. In the end, it was simple. I took the cotton cord Geoff purchased at the local hardware shop, went into the house, and strung the line between three old trees. It was completed about six minutes later.

I had been waiting to hang the line, however, for months. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t manage to get out the door. On the one hand, I was so tired of the queasy disease that erupted in my belly every time I pushed the “on” button of our electric dryer. I know too much about how much electricity my dryer consumes (up to 13% of the household tally), in order to do the work that sun and wind can do for free, without cost to the environment, just steps beyond the wall.

However, I was hemmed in by habit, and by lingering doubts as to whether or not line drying would be as cool or as convenient as plug, press, and spin. Finally, the resistance overrode the ruts, and pushed me out the door with cord, clothespins, and hamper in hand. My kids came along, cheering me on, eager to participate. I wondered how long this festive air would last.

As the line fills with clothes, niggling doubts flood my mind. I should be using a dryer. I smile at my cultural conditioning. It wasn’t so long ago that everyone hung clothes to dry. Then came the marketing campaigns of the 1950s, urging people to Live Better Electrically. The meaning of a clothesline shifted. No longer a useful implement for drying laundry, it became a waving flag alerting all who could see that those living here were poor, behind the times, and unable to keep up.
Since 2008, Susan Taylor has been fighting her homeowner's association for the right to hang a line. On July 26, 2008, a man died in Verona, Mississippi when his neighbor, tired of asking him not to hang his clothes, shot him.

Yet, as I make my way down the line to the second birch tree, I remind myself. Times are changing, and so is the meaning of the clothesline. Increasingly, the clothesline is a sign of the freedom to resist patterns of consumption that are fueling our ecological crisis. It is a sign of a commitment to reduce the energy we use to wear and wash, and its attendant costs. I want to stay in touch with my freedom.

I empty the laundry basket and step back to survey the array. Shirts of assorted sizes hang shoulder to shoulder; pants jog in the breeze. Sheets flutter, socks flap, and towels hang heavy. There is pleasure in the patterns of shape and color, and in the movement that reveals the movement of the breeze I now sense blowing against my cheeks. The sun is warm.

Now, as I do laundry, I can move. I reach and twist, bend over, sink down, and rise again, folding and unfolding a bodily self that has spent more than enough of the day sitting at a computer. It is the movement of walking outside, of responding to the whims and whorls of nature, of being present to this place. It is the movement of aligning my efforts with the rhythms of day and night, sun and rain, heat and cold, in ways that pace my efforts and nourish my sensory self.

This clothesline and my unexpectedly enthusiastic response to it have got me thinking. So many of our labor and time saving devices work to save us labor and time by reducing our opportunities for moving our bodily selves. Yet in the name of granting us pleasure, they deprive us of a primary source of it moving our bodily selves. In the name of protecting us from the inconveniences of the natural world, they separate us from its nourishing effects.

When we move we breathe; when we breathe we feel; when we feel we have resources for thinking and feeling in new ways. We bring our senses to life. We bring sense to life.

However, the reality is that once we separate our immense capacity to move our bodily selves from our requirements for living, our bodily movement no longer carries the same significance it once had. Movement is then about entertainment or recreation or physical health; we no longer perceive it or value it as essential to our mental and spiritual well being, or as a key to creating a mutually enabling relationship with the natural world. Movement drops as a priority in our lives, falling in rank below the “necessary” tasks of school and work, screen time and the effort of maintaining all of our time and labor saving devices. We find it difficult to motivate ourselves to move, and cannot figure out why.

I have been looking over my blog entries for the past two and a half years. I see a pattern. Every fall, I have made a new move, reinventing my blog to focus on a different aspect of my project. I spent the first nine months laying out the structure of What a Body Knows, before devoting a year to telling Farm Stories, and another to Making Connections between my work in What a Body Knows and cultural conversations in the news.

It's time to string a new line. The sense of needing to make a difference is overriding my habitual approach. In the following few months, I will be focusing more specifically on movement human movement, bodily movement.

I wish to explore how we're moving and what we are making when we do. I need to research what actions we evolved to build and why we could; what movements we have the possibility to make and why we ought to. I wish to explore how vital our practices of movement are for creating a mutually enabling connection to the ordinary world. I would like to write about dance.

I love the design and action and smell of line-drying clothing. My mom never used a dryer, and I have not used one since 1975 except when we have a very long wet spell and I use one at the Laundromat. Admittedly, when I live in sunny California, lots of people do and much more of us could possibly be line-drying if we didn't have this prejudice that it was low-class to do so.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes collecting things, shopping online and playing computer, has a coach outlet online and coach purses outlet with lots of fashion things.