Cold Weather and Clotheslines

Across the Fence #478

I don’t have to tell anyone that it’s been really cold lately. It’s been the main topic of conversation, once our lips thaw out enough to talk. This will be a winter that will give people bragging rights for many years to come. “It got down to 24 below at our house on the ridge.” That’s nothing. It was 28 below at our place in the valley.” “You think that’s cold? It was 30 below at our house… and that was the inside temperature!” It was so cold at our place we had to thaw out our words in a frying pan to see what we were saying.” And the bragging goes on and on. It’s been that kind of winter.    

So how cold was it? It was so cold that people who hung their clothes on the line to dry needed three days for the clothes to thaw out after they brought them into the house. I realize many people don’t know anything about clotheslines and hanging clothes out to dry on them. I don’t pretend to be an expert either, but at least I know what a clothesline is used for.

We always had an outdoor clothesline when I was young. Every week Ma would wash clothes in a wringer washing machine and then hang them out to dry. She did this all year ‘round, regardless of the weather. Sometimes she had us kids take the clothes off the line and bring them in the house where she would iron the clothes that needed ironing and fold them. Now I suspect many people don’t even own an iron and ironing board.

I remember how fresh the clothes smelled after hanging on the line. I also remember frozen clothes piled on the kitchen table thawing out. Some of those blue jeans and bib overalls were so stiff I think we could have pounded nails with them. 

When it comes to clotheslines, people have a lot of memories and they are usually positive.

Around 1935 on the Sherpe farm at Old Towne. 

L-R: Agnes Steenberg, Marjorie (Steenberg) Haugen, 

Alice (Sherpe) Sherman behind my grandmother, Inga Sherpe, 

with clothes under her arm from the clothesline behind her.

A good friend from Madison told me, “How well I remember how Mother would put the clothes out in the winter, bare-handed, of course, and the clothes would freeze. (This was NORTHERN Minnesota, mind you) By the time she finished hanging out the clothes she would take them in again and put them on the dining room table at night. By morning they would be the dampness needed to iron them. It wasn’t easy. For some reason or other, she didn’t seem to want us kids to help. Most likely we couldn’t do it right.”

Another person said, “We had metal poles at each end (of the line). It was so sturdy that Dad put a swing on one of them, so one of my memories of clotheslines is swinging while mom hung out the clothes! I can still feel what that was like - the sun shining, big white fluffy clouds, wind in my face, and mom and I singing and talking.” 

My classmate, Ardy, often commented on my columns or sent ideas for new ones. I miss her e-mails. She’s hanging clothes on that big clothesline in the sky now. She once wrote, “Your description of your dad and neighbor stopping to talk reminded me of years ago when I had tons of laundry to do and took the time to hang it on the clothesline. I was never sure if it was the freshness of the clothes when they dried, or the visiting with the neighborhood gals, who were also hanging out laundry, that made it appealing. It was another version of talking “across the fence.”

Last summer, my cousin Sue Ostrem wrote, “I just took clothes off the line at our family farm, like Mom used to do. I have one of her jackets and in one of the pockets was a clothes pin. I can just see her probably heading to town and looking back over her shoulder at the clothesline and there was a pin... and maybe rain coming... so not to leave the little clothes pin on the line to get wet, she must have put it in her pocket, thinking she would take it out when she got home, never thinking that years in the future I would find it and treasure it. Yes, I still have the clothes pin in the pocket. And there it shall stay.”

Speaking of clothes pins, there were different types that I remember, all made out of wood. Just as Sue mentioned, you didn’t leave clothes pins on the line. You always gathered the pins when taking down dry clothes! Pins left on the lines could get dirty and the springs could rust. The efficient way to hang clothes was to line the clothes up so you didn’t need two clothes pins per item. You shared one between two items. That way you didn’t need to buy as many and saved money. 

Another thing, you always hung the sheets and towels on the outside lines so you could hide your underwear on the middle lines where people couldn’t see them. You can tell a lot about a family by driving by and seeing what’s hanging on their line, including how large the family is, the approximate ages of the kids, what kind of clothes they wear, and if there’s nothing on the line on a Monday, they probably headed south to get out of this deep freeze!

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