Chapter 38 - Rope Clothesline

According to Boy: We did not have a washer and dryer in Glendale. Unless, of course, you consider a sink a clothes washer, and a rope on a pulley (outside our kitchen window) a dryer. If so, then we had them.

Once a week we would pack up all our dirty clothes, shove them in the huge laundry bag (one I had left over from undergraduate school), and off we would go to the laundromat. Each of us would usually have two loads to wash, and one each to dry. It would take us about an hour, maybe a little longer. It was not a great time, but it was okay. We would buy a cup of coffee, then read and talk until the wash was done. We would always do it on a weekday evening—we were not going to waste a weekend doing something as mundane as our laundry.

I always sent my dress shirts out—folded, heavy starch. Even when we were really poor, I still liked to have a nice, crisp shirt to wear. So my wash basically consisted of jeans, socks and underwear.

Between trips to the laundromat, Evie would often wash out a pair of tights, or some underwear, in the bathroom sink. If it was winter, she would hang them in the shower to dry. If it was not freezing out, however, she would wrap them in a bath towel, and carry them into the kitchen. She would then open the kitchen window (Mister’s window), and hang her wash on the clothes line that was attached to the outside wall, just about midway up the window.

There was a pulley hooked on the house, and another one on a pole at the back of our lot, with a semi-taut clothesline hung between the two. There was a similar assembly directly below, for Mrs. Robinson’s use.

Using spring powered wood clothespins, Evie would carefully attach her Capezios to the line, followed by an assortment of various colored socks.

Occasionally, some of her clothes would fall off the line, probably due to stiff winds or defective clothes pins. Then, of course, she would have to go down and ask Mrs. Robinson for permission to go in the back yard to retrieve her underwear. I don’t think that happened very much.

Sometimes the winter winds would come up all of a sudden, and freeze her clothes stiff as a board. She would ask me to remove them from the line when that happened.

After time, when Bonnie and Clyde grew larger and more odiferous, she ceased using the outside clothesline. There was just something repulsive about mounds of St. Bernard defecation. Eventually only Mister got a kick out of the kitchen window—that’s why it became known as "Mister’s window."