Pet Please #130: Drying Laundry in a Machine

td580When I was a kid, we had a drying machine, but my parents hardly ever used it. I think it was an environmental thing, or maybe a way to reduce the electric bill.

Either way, if you wanted dry laundry, you hung it on a line. My parents still have the same line strung up behind our house, and there are several drying racks in the house.

I’ve now lived in the same condo for 11 years, and the washer-dryer combo in my unit will wash but not dry. So I usually hang up clothes on a drying rack in my bedroom; they take a few days to dry.

But sometimes–sometimes–I use the free, full-size washing machine down the hall. And when I do that, I get to use accompanying drying machine.

I’m not quite sure what it is, but it just makes me happy. I think part of it is my family’s history with drying machines (or lack thereof)–it feels like an indulgence to use a dryer. Part of it is the speed–I don’t need to wait 2 days to wear those clothes. And part of it is the warm embrace of the clothes as I pull them from the dryer.

Can you relate to this? Is there anything you had limited access to as a kid that now feels like a special indulgence?

4 thoughts on “Pet Please #130: Drying Laundry in a Machine”

  1. I was just thinking about this earlier this week. My parents also hung clothes on the line. Not as an environmental concern but to save money I assume. With the amount of laundry my family goes through i’d need my yard to be strung up like a scene from Blair witch if we even wanted to try hanging a load of laundry much less the four or five a week. Pretty much everything seems like an indulgence these days compared to when I was a kid. Hell my parents refused to pay for cable but I pay just south of $200 a month for TV and Internet. $30 a month was a significant bill back in the day.

    Reply
    • Nikolaus: It sounds like you had a similar upbringing to my own! I figure it’s a good thing, as if I had grown up with these “indulgences,” my grown-up versions of indulgences would be way over the top, like hiring someone to air-dry every piece of my clothing.

      Reply
  2. It takes two days to dry your clothes!? You know a dehumidifier can dry your wet clothes in a closed room in less than 24 hours. My relatives over in Hong Kong don’t have dryers, so they hang their wet clothes in the bathroom with their dehumidifier and the next day they are bone dry. When I was a kid, we didn’t have fancy dehumidifier, we have fancy bamboo sticks along with our stacked washer/dryer. Some clothes need to be air and they would be on these bamboo sticks in our flat’s balcony. Like in this picture but definitely not that much in the elements. https://martalivesinchina.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/clothes-hanging.jpg

    They have much fancier rods for air drying clothes on the balcony now if you have room for it. https://s1212.photobucket.com/user/tabbylady99/media/IMG_0710.jpg.html

    Reply

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