Clotheslines remembered…

Editor’s Note: Two readers share memories inspired by Ardeana Hamlin’s By Hand column about clotheslines last week.

Norma Jean Brilliant, Old Town

My very earliest memory, from some 50 years ago, has to do with a clothesline. I clearly remember the scene and how I felt. My mother hung clothes on the clothesline year-round. I was in high school before she broke down and bought a dryer. Anyway, on Mondays – washing day – she would haul in the old wringer washer and washtubs from the shed to the kitchen sink. I can still smell the oil of the wringer washer.

Once the clothes were ready, she would position me in a window to watch her – actually, she was watching me – while she hung clothes outside in the frigid cold. Before she went outdoors, she peeled and sectioned an orange or apple, and I was told to stay in the window, eat my snack and watch her while she was outside. Of course, I left the window long enough for her to come running inside to see if I was in trouble. Week after week, it was the same scene. It felt really good to have her all to myself because my sister was in school and I had all of her daytime attention for a couple of years.

Carolyn K. Larson, Lamoine

I am old enough to remember my grandmother’s “square” rotating clothesline at her home on Main Street in Saco. Of course, it was hidden by a lattice work fence for modesty. How long ago? I also remember the ice man delivering huge blocks of ice and putting them through a door next to the back entrance (near that clothesline) for the “icebox.” The icebox had many doors, the latches of which were great fun for little girls to open. Then we would be yelled at for opening them.

My son lived in Saco until he moved to Florida last year to a development that forbade clotheslines! So sad.

We remember clotheslines, perhaps, because our sense of smell has the sharpest recollection. It also may be because those were less stressful times. I also discovered that new washing machines, or at least the Maytag I bought to replace an 18-year-old one that died, have no lint filter, a cost-cutting measure (according to the response I got) because so few people hang laundry now, and dryers have filters. I still hang laundry, though I admit I don’t hang clothes in the dead of winter. I remember too well towels and shirts that came off the line stiff as cardboard. I now have to carefully sort towels and other big lint-producers and wait for windy days – not hard down here.