I've been hunting around for just *the perfect* solution for line drying my clothes. I figured I'd need some kind of fancy umbrella line dryer so I could place it in the sideyard where we have fewer trees. Then we lost a fair number of trees in the back so I wasn't quite as worried about birds pooping on our clothes, but I thought it would be cool to have a retractable line. Neither the cool umbrella lines nor the retractable lines are exactly cheap. It didn't make sense to me to spend a lot of money on something that I was undertaking partially to save money - did you know that clothes dryers take up approximately 14% of the average home owner's electricity bill?

I finally realized that sometimes it's okay to go low tech. I picked up a simple 100-foot clothes line and some clothes pins at Walgreens yesterday. Even with my prescription, the total was only $15 so we're not talking big bucks here.

I came home and tied one end on an old metal clothes line poll. It's probably been here since the house was built in the 1920s. The other end I tied to a metal hook on the garage. Piper was very excited to hang out the clothes, so she brought out her stool and started helping me pin the clothes up. Soon she didn't need her stool. The line kept drooping closer to the ground.

I went back over to the hook to try to tighten up my knot. Yay. What I thought was a simple plant hanger was apparently some kind of weapon. It sliced open my hand - doesn't look like much, but blood started dramatically flowing down my hand and dripping off my fingers. After a rinse in cold water and an internet search to see whether I was in danger of contracting tetanus from the old rusty thing, we finished hanging the clothes.

I have to say, it was pretty cool. Something so simple brought back so many memories for me of looking up at the clothes sailing in the breeze at my grandparents house. I remember watching my grandmother take a sheet from the basket and fishing out some pins from the bottom. A few she stuck in her mouth for safe keeping as she tried to fight against the wind to pin it to the line.

Our clothes dried much faster than I thought they would. It kind of makes me a little ashamed that I've been wasting so much energy. I probably would have run the dryer for at least 40 minutes for that one load that took maybe 20 minutes to dry in the fresh air. And my little helper just had a great time!

(I also think it's hilarious how big my yard looks in these kinds of photos. It's all an optical illusion.)