It was Boy in Black who first started the trend of washing clothes and then hanging them up wherever he could to dry: on the chandelier in the front hallway, on the curtain rod above the sliding glass doors, or from the fireplace mantel. It used to drive me crazy, to come home and have to brush past wet Ultimate jerseys just to enter my home. Even when it’s just been washed, an Ultimate shirt smells like layers of old sweat.
“Why are your shirts hanging all over the living room?” I’d ask.
Boy in Black would answer calmly. “Because I just did a wash. I’ve hung them to dry.”
“Can’t you hang them somewhere else?” I’d ask.
He’d look up from his computer. “Where?”
He had a point. We don’t have a basement or an attic. In the summer months, clothes can be hung outside on sunny days, but in this climate, summer lasts only a few months, and much of that is rainy.
Besides, there was a certain logic to his method. Forced air heating takes the moisture out of the air in our house, and the newly washed clothes dry pretty fast. Certainly, it doesn’t make sense to waste energy using the dryer if we don’t need to. Clothes that have been hung to dry last longer, shrink less, and don’t need to be ironed.
Pretty soon, Boy in Black had converted the rest of the household. When I do a load of wash, I grab a bunch of hangers and just start hanging shirts anywhere I can. We’ve all gotten used to clothes hanging on the curtain rod by the table. When the sun shines in against them in the early morning, the colors can be quite pretty.