A final laundry note
Before I get off the subject for good (when?? please!! you’re probably saying), I’ll just share one last laundry experience in the hopes it might save someone else from a similar pointless exercise.
A few weeks ago we were having a lot of rainy weather here, and what with our limited selection of clothes, I worried a lot about getting it to dry by the time we would need it again.
And then I remembered what my mother so un-fondly recalls doing when we lived in England in the early 1950s, which was to retrieve the frozen-stiff garments from the clothesline and iron them dry.
Brilliant, I thought, I’ll just do that! The old style! How simple, how elegant! (How labor-intensive, but oh well.)
How mistaken.
Oh, it still works with some things, pure cotton jeans are fine. But in most clothes nowadays, even the clothes of a natural-fiber freak like me, there lurks some small percentage of synthetic content which does NOT take well to being steamed dry with a hot iron. No, these fabrics will melt, rather than dry, under a hot-iron assault.
If you think about it, it wasn’t so long ago, maybe 100 years, that people boiled their dirty linens. That was before my time, but I can remember the days when Clorox was routinely used; everything white (read cotton) got bleached. And then they had bluing to counteract the yellowing effects of the bleach. I suppose all socks must have been wool back then. (A pair of wool socks costs at least $12 now, and you have to buy them at a backpacking store — when did that happen?) But I digress. In sum, take heed: old-style laundering practices can be hazardous to present-day fabrics.
So, it was back to the drawing board, or more accurately, to the clothesline, this time one strung up indoors for those rainy-day Saturdays.