Published: July 02, 2009 08:24 pm      

Memories hung on clotheslines

EDMOND — It’s Monday. My washer and dryer are humming away in the utility room. No scrubbing on a washboard for me. No hanging out to dry or hauling back inside. I am blessed.

You know what being clotheslined means to a football player, but did you know the term originated in backyard games?

“Sheep my pen!” rang out on a 1940s summer evening, and neighborhood kids, their hearts racing, sprang from cover and sprinted through the dark toward home base, the shepherd in hot pursuit.

It’s a wonder there weren’t decapitations. Chin-high clotheslines were strung across the back yards, separating a dozen sheep from their designated pens. You didn’t want to tangle with one of those under a full head of steam.

Clotheslines were responsible for my generation’s pleasure, and sometimes for our persecution. We hung quilts over parallel rows of taut wires strung between T-shaped posts set in concrete at either end and camped out beneath the resulting tent. Sometimes we picnicked there, and sometimes we sheltered from a short-lived, fast-moving shower in that soggy cavern.

Clothesline-quilt tents were the pleasure part. The persecution part came on Mondays when we were sent out to scrub away a week’s residue from the lines in preparation for the laundry we would attach to them with clothespins we carried in deep-pocketed aprons tied about our waists — the same aprons that would receive those clothespins as we later removed the dry wash and carried it into the house in wicker baskets.

The vision seems almost pastoral — and it was on bright, windless days. But that sort of day was rare in Western Oklahoma, where the least little wind kicked up red dust that could render those lines of clean clothes filthy and send them back to the wash. And there were winter days when freshly laundered clothes froze to the lines and had to be pried loose, taken inside to thaw, and then draped over surfaces to dry.

Even so, my vintage of kids had no cause to complain. With lye soap they had made, our grandmothers before us had scrubbed clean on washboards what our moms set to sloshing about in electric machines equipped with wringers that cranked garments into tubs of water to rinse away powdered soap they had bought from a grocer, the last tub with a dollop of bluing to brighten white garments, tea towels and sheets.

I doubt our grandmothers bothered with such niceties. As often as not, their clotheslines were wire fences that surrounded the house, or shrubbery if there was no fence. No, my generation had no cause to complain.

Clothesline mushrooms sprang up in suburban backyards 50 years later, but you wouldn’t find one of those ugly, outsized, umbrella-ribbed things in any respectable backyard in the rural community where I lived. Those monsters could snap shut with no provocation, trapping the unsuspecting inside. Besides, there was no way to drape a quilt over those imposters.

Coin laundries, or Laundromats, came along in the 50s. They were small, narrow buildings that offered a few washers on one wall and a few dryers on the other, and they never closed. In all kinds of weather, we young working mothers loaded up our laundry and our children and made an evening of it, visiting, plugging coins into slots, helping each other load sleeping babies and folded laundry into our cars.

I thought I’d gone to heaven the day my automatic washer and dryer were delivered in the mid-’60s. A day hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t run my fingertips over that duo and thanked God for Mr. Maytag.



MARJORIE ANDERSON is an Edmond resident.