The Old Ways

Each week I start out thinking about what I’ll write for the blog and then just when I think I’ve hit upon something really interesting, another idea will present itself and, well, here we are.

Yesterday, as I was hanging laundry on the line instead of throwing it in the dryer, I began to think about this old way of doing things. Have you ever really thought about it? Saving energy by not using your dryer? I do it all the time, hang laundry on the line that is, even though we have a dryer. But I don’t do it to purposefully save energy, that honestly never crosses my mind. I hang my laundry outside because, well that’s what I’ve always done. So if the weather is nice I hang the laundry out. But things were a little different years ago.

As you may know I raised five children and the majority of that time I didn’t have a dryer. Instead I had long clotheslines stretched between trees in the back yard. Or in the winter I had drying racks, strategically placed over the hot air vents in the house. Do you know how many loads of laundry you have to do in a day for a family of seven? At least three, often more! During this time I learned that if the furnace is really blowing, or the wind outside is whipping, as it tends to do in Iowa in summer, you can actually dry a whole load of laundry while the second load is washing! That first load will be all dry and ready to put away by the time the second load finishes washing. And if you are hanging the laundry outside, and you position the button up shirts just right, the wind will blow them like sails, filling the sleeves and blowing all the wrinkles out so you won’t even have to iron them before hanging them in the closet. I learned all of that because I had to. Not because I wanted to save energy or decrease my carbon footprint or help reduce climate change, or any of the terms we hear today. No I did all of that because back then we couldn’t afford a dryer. I was energy efficient by default.

This got me thinking about other household chores that I did without the modern conveniences that today I just take for granted. Like washing the dishes by hand. I raised five children without a dishwasher either. In my household everyone learned to wash dishes as soon as they were old enough to stand on a chair in front of the sink. By the time they were all school age we rotated dishwashing duty on a daily bases. Seven days in a week, seven people that could wash dishes, everyone was assigned a day. Worked great! Until they went off to college one by one and I had to pick up the slack! Recently I read that it’s actually more energy efficient, and better for the environment, to use the dishwasher rather then wash dishes by hand. I found this hard to believe since my dishwasher runs for 4 1/2 hours and I can wash dishes by hand in about 15 minutes. The article I read said that dishwashers use 3.5 to 5 gallons of water. While washing dishes by hand uses 27 gallons of water. What the heck? Who uses 27 gallons of water to wash dishes? Are they bathing in the sink too?

So yesterday, after hanging the laundry on the line I decided to put hand washing the dishes to a test. Could I wash the dishes, by hand, in the same amount of water a dishwasher uses? I decided to go with 4 gallons of water. I unloaded all the dishes from the dishwasher. I filled one half of my sink with 2 gallons of hot water with dish soap added in. I then filled the other side of my sink with 2 gallons of plain hot water. I washed the dishes in the soapy side and then dipped them in the plain water side to rinse and placed them in the rack to air dry. Worked perfectly! Everything was clean and by letting the dishes air dry I didn’t use any electricity at all. I’m thinking the people using 27 gallons of water, to wash dishes by hand, are letting the faucet run while they are rinsing the dishes. I saw my mother-in-law do that once back in the 90’s. I was sitting in her kitchen watching her wash up the dishes that wouldn’t fit in her dishwasher after a large family meal. I remember thinking at the time how much water she was wasting by letting the faucet run like that. Back then I didn’t have a dishwasher nor would I have ever let the water run continuously from the faucet like that, because well, we just couldn’t afford it. Wasting water by letting it run like that was a luxury.

All this thinking about the old ways brought to mind other things I learned to go without as a young mother, not because I wanted to save energy or the planet, but because at that time, we just couldn’t afford them. Things like paper towels. Never had a single roll of paper towels in our house when the kids were young. I used kitchen towels to wipe up messes and then I washed them and hung them on the line. Tissues were another one! Five kids, multiple colds and flu, rarely did anyone use a tissue. Toilet paper worked just as well, pull some off and fold it up, you’ll be fine. Tissues were an added expense that we just couldn’t afford. Back then my grandmother always bought me boxes of tissues for Christmas, the ones with the lotion infused in them! They were like a luxury. Diapers were another matter all together. At one point I had three children in diapers at the same time. And when they were all potty trained I followed that up with two more children in diapers at the same time! I used cloth diapers. Again not because I was trying to save the planet, but because we just couldn’t afford disposable diapers. And things like diaper wipes? Never even used them. I had small washcloths that I got wet and wiped bums with. I carried them around in a plastic bag if we were going out! Washed those with the diapers and hung them on the line. If there are 35 year old disposable diapers and wipes sitting in a landfill somewhere I can honestly say none of them are mine!

Oh the old ways…..maybe going without, was, well….actually better!

And for those that are wondering, yes that is my laundry hanging on the line in the photo above!! This particular clothesline I purchased on Amazon this spring. It has a spiked holder that you set into the ground, pushing it all the way down until it’s flush with the lawn and then the clothesline post fits into that holder. This way you can remove the whole thing and mow over it in the summer. Or bring it everything inside for the harsh Maine winter. It collapses down when not in use, as seen in the photo below. And comes with a cover if you wanted to cover it when not in use or to store it inside for the winter. It holds several loads of laundry and even holds my king size sheets. I love it! If anyone would like to try hanging your laundry outside, you know, to save energy and all of that, this is a good choice for easy installation and doesn’t take up a lot of space.

I noticed while looking at the photo of my. laundry hanging there, that I always turn my laundry basket upside down over my basket of clothespins. Not sure why really, other then that my grandmother told me to do that! Didn’t seem like useless advice.