Years ago, when I lived in Los Angeles and my mother first came to visit, she expressed mystification over the laundry habits of Angeleno's. In a city with such beautiful weather, why, she wondered, does no-one hang there washing on a line to dry?
A couple of years later, I watched a documentary on the great English artist David Hockney. Hockney was raised in Bradford, a gritty, working-class city less than an hour north of Manchester. Hockney has made Los Angeles his home for many years, and in the documentary, he said that his mother, upon visiting LA, wanted to know the same thing as my mother - why no washing lines? Such then, are the concerns of a certain generation of working-class women.
A couple of weeks ago, home in Manchester, the newspapers - and the public at large - were celebrating 'the hottest Easter in 100 years...sunnier than Los Angeles, dryer than Madrid!' Good then, to see that my mother was taking advantage of the weather, hanging her laundry out to dry.
3 comments:
Your very American wife would also like a laundry line, please!
I have a laundry line and don't use it nearly enough. For one thing, everything dries stiff like sandpaper. Ask your mom how to remedy this please.
erin, you have to use fabric softener (liquid kind, in the wash) since you don't use a dryer sheet if it's on the line. that should work...
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