Clotheslines Categories

Michel Vézina / Categories: In a few words, Society

Until clothes dryers became affordable and their operation significantly improved, around the mid-1980s, the technique for drying laundry was to hang it on a line.

It will be remembered that until this time Monday was washing day: a habit, tradition, rite, ritual, or convenience. On Mondays, the clotheslines were thus filled with all the possible clothes of the household.

Temperature obviously played an essential role in the drying process. The ideal was a sunny day with a little wind, the latter being able to accelerate the drying. But if the wind was too strong, it could tear the clothes off the clothesline which was held in place by pins, first in wood and then in plastic. As soon as the rain was announced, we had to remove the laundry and put it to dry everywhere in the house, preferably in the kitchen, near the stove from which emanated more heat.

In winter, wet laundry froze quickly in the cold and damp in the region of Quebec where we lived. We brought in the laundry, which held up so much that it was frozen. Again, it had to be laid out in the house to soften it.

Clotheslines were indicative of the tops and bottoms of the people who wore them. I remember the comments of my many uncles who came to the house and went under the women's underwear of some of our neighbors. At the time, we were too young to understand exactly the meaning of these, our concerns being elsewhere. The more the families were made up of numerous children, the more there were ropes of linen.

When my mother first came to Saskatchewan, the first thing she noticed was that we had no clothesline, only a clothes dryer. For her, a clothesline was always an essential part of any home. worthy of the name. And besides, we didn't have a pole close enough to the house to install one. She had to resign herself to drying the laundry in the dryer.

By talking with people in the community, she learned that in the West people had quickly switched to the dryer for at least two reasons: the strength of the ambient wind, which is always very strong, which easily tears the clothes off; and the omnipresence of dust (or sand) in the air, a memory of years of drought in the collective memory.

Lately, with the help of the pandemic, as we walk daily through the streets and alleys of Gravelbourg, we have noticed that clotheslines are once again very present in the community, which was less common in past years. And looking closely, we can see that they seem to be more present in young families.

Have you ever “slept on the clothesline”? If your face is drawn from a restless sleep and you don't look rested, just like laundry that's been out on the clothesline all night, or you've partied all night without sleeping , that's what people will say about you! This is an expression inherited from this era, the era of the clothesline!

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