Powering Down

Our beloved clothes washer stopped working last week. It turns out that one of those little wooden ice-cream sundae spoons–the ones that look like a miniature paddle–was stuck in the water pump. I see now that there’s a little door set in the front of the washing machine (though on some machines it’s located in the back) that very much looks like and opens like your car’s gas tank. This is the water pump cleanout.

See? Lower right corner? I give you the not exactly invisible cleanout.

Here’s a helpful little bit of appliance advice from me to you: open this and fish out the garbage before you call your local appliance repair person. Maybe you’ll save yourself some moolah. Either that, or go through everyone‘s clothing much more carefully than I do. Which, frankly, would not be at all difficult. Ahem. Yes, I KNOW Mom. I should empty everyone‘s pockets etc. etc. etc. I think it‘s plenty that I separate the darks from the lights and that I wash everyone‘s stuff for them. I‘m not going to go through all of those pockets. Ack. The tedium.

Alas, I did not know about our little friend the cleanout, and so I got the name of a good repair guy from my friend Shawna, who knows these sorts of things. And after a rousing game of telephone tag, the repair guy came out, stepped over the mountain range of dirty laundry that had accumulated, and said, um, where’s your dryer?

Hmm. Where IS the dryer?

It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was saying. I’d completely forgotten we don’t have a dryer.

I explained that we got rid of it three years ago, and ever since, we’ve managed quite happily with the outdoor clothes line and an indoor drying rack for the winter when we need the extra humidity anyhow.

He didn’t ask why we got rid of the dryer.

Maybe he was respecting our privacy? Or possibly he was little afraid that he had stumbled into a den of weirdos and wanted to keep his head down? Or he was simply incurious? At any rate, we went on instead to talk about the cliff swallows swooping around the front yard (obviously, he was a fan, too, and he appreciated the fact that we have seven different cliff swallow nests going, YAY) and he told me that back in the day, he and his dad used to fix my Uncle Paul’s refrigeration unit in his gigantic apple cooler. He also remembered that there was something weird about my uncle’s death.  So we talked a bit about that. Almost thirty years ago, my uncle was killed in a horrible accident involving a split-rim tire.  Uncle Paul was a really kind man.  And his orchard was just beautiful.  I wish I had pictures to show you.  Now, OF COURSE, it’s mostly been pushed out. Damn the march of time.

Here’s the thing about having roots in a place that run as deep as mine. You don’t have to dig very deep before you discover connections between yourself and perfect strangers who live several towns away. You might have to go back a generation or so, but often the connection is there. And I don’t think that kind of fishing-for-common-ground conversation is a waste of time. In my experience, what my youngest daughter calls “those annoying twenty-minute TALKS you have with people” serve to make moving among strangers more comfortable. (For a fabulous historical examination of the discomfort of people who suddenly found themselves living among strangers during the rapid urbanization of the mid-19th century, I refer you to Confidence Men and Painted Women, a masterful history written by my friend and the most amazing cultural historian, Karen Halttunen).

Chit-chatting and finding common ground reminds us that you and I are not so unlike, that I can feel okay about inviting a strange man into my home with its disorderly laundry room, and he can feel okay about messing about in the bacteria-laden water-pump cleanout of what seems to be, at least initially, a houseful of wackos. (No clothes dryer. School-aged children running around in the middle of the day, so they’re either truants or very relaxed homeschoolers. A piece of old carpet and planks of OSB leading from the driveway to the front door. Etcetera).

Anyhow, what with all the chatting, the repair guy left in a rush for his next appointment and never asked WHY we don’t have a clothes dryer.

In case you are wondering, though, here’s why not:

1) I hate the idea of burning coal, which powers our local electricity, in order to do something as prosaic as dry my laundry. Coal is dirty. It pollutes neighborhoods and makes their most vulnerable residents sick. I don‘t want a coal-fired plant in my backyard and unless you do, please don’t start with the nonsense that coal is just fine. Coal-mining contributes to the destruction of naturally beautiful places like the Appalachians, it contributes to the horrible deaths of miners, and coal-fired power plants emit vast amounts of CO2 which contribute mightily to anthropogenic climate change.  And “clean coal” is proving to be a complete boondoggle.  So far as I know, they’ve not successfully implemented clean coal technology in a power plant anywhere. Furthermore, humans have yet to resolve the problem of how to get coal without ripping off mountain tops and destroying the ecosystem of coal regions, so I’m not buying what they’re selling. Well, I am buying electricity, but as little as possible. (Yes, we have a Kill-A-Watt and No, we aren’t afraid to use it).

2) Happily, it’s economically wise for us to go with passive solar to dry our laundry. Our clothes dryer was old and probably inefficient, so Ta DA, as soon as we got rid of it, our electricity bills dropped thirty-percent. We track that sort of thing around here, (well, the Engineer does), and them’s the numbers, People.

3) It’s good for the clothes. Line-dried clothes smell better, everyone knows that, but arguably, they last longer too. Less wear and tear from tumbling about in super-high heat. And some folks make the argument that line-drying clothes is more hygienic. I’m not actually too worried about my clothes getting cleaner. I’m happy with what the washing machine does for them, but some of you clean freaks might find the baking-in-the-sun aspects of line-drying appealing. I guess it’s nice to think that everyone’s undies are really extra fresh.

4) If you have a big old clothes-line, and I do, you can pack the clothes on the line just as quickly as the washing machine can wash ‘em. And because you know I’m an Energy Star, you already figured out that I use the minimum time setting on my washing machine (25 minutes, start to finish, and cold water ONLY) every time. Right? So I never have to deal with wet clothes stacking up in the laundry room while I wait for the clothes dryer to finish. Which is a good thing because my laundry room is tiny. So I can do four or five loads of laundry in one day, and get it all out on the line at the same time. Ta DA.

5) There’s an aesthetic component to line-drying laundry that I’m not sure I can adequately express. I LOVE how clothes look when they are drying on the line, especially if there’s a bit of a breeze to shift the clothes about on the line. I can see my clothesline from the kitchen table, and I like it that way.

Windless and yet, still, oddly appealing.

6) And last but not least, it’s sure-fire alone time. Privacy is nearly unknown around here. People will barge in on you if you’re trying to sleep (seemingly, especially, if you‘re sleeping) , or holler for help when you’re in the bathroom, or if you are down on your hands and knees scrubbing food off the floor. But only the most careless child or desperate spouse will dare to venture outside to ask me where is my X? because they know that I’ll press them into service on the line before lifting a finger on their behalf. So it’s just you and the birds and the sussuration of trees and traffic. It’s very relaxing. I could hang up clothes all day long.

I still hate folding laundry though.