Dry Clothes Naturally

Reader Contribution by Carole Coates
Published on September 13, 2019
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An inexpensive way to dry your laundry.

When my grandmothers were young women, they hand-scrubbed clothes outdoors in tubs of water heated over an open flame—in all kinds of weather. Men may have built the fire on occasion, but, yes, doing the laundry fell to the womenfolk.

In her youth, my mom used a portable washing machine which sat on the back porch (kitchens weren’t built to hold any appliance other than a wood cookstove) and required the user to run each piece of laundry through a hand wringer. It also regularly delivered electric shocks. Both generations, as well as all who had gone before, hung wet clothes outdoors to dry.

By the time I entered my teens, my homemaker mom owned a brand new washer plus an electric clothes dryer. The new, widely-hailed conveniences flooding the post World War II market seemed miraculous to people like her. She rarely used a clothesline again.

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