Our dryer finished its cycle on a load of towels about three weeks ago and didn’t get them a dern bit drier than when it started.
So, we ran them through again, with no improvement.
The towels were still as damp as the morning dew.
Fortunately, there were enough clean, dry towels in the house for us to take showers and I took the wet ones to a laundromat to dry them.
In the meantime, Kindra and I decided to troubleshoot the dryer problem and deduced that it was most likely that the heating element had gone bad.
So, we ordered one, which arrived by brown truck the next day.
My lower back, which is a well-maintained but unrestored 1952 model, elected not to bend far enough to allow me to remove the heating element from inside the bottom of the dryer, so the everwilling Kindra volunteered to.
She pulled the old one, reconnected the wires and put in the new one. I handed her tools and offered sincere encouragement.
Turns out the heating element wasn’t the problem. So we called in a repair guy, who said we needed another part. The new one to replace it turned out to be defective and, as of this writing, there is another one its way.
So, while we’ve been waiting, we’ve been using Mother Nature’s dryer: the clothes line.
It’s cheap and efficient, with an appealing selfsufficiency vibe and it’s what we did most of the time I was growing up.
When I was in grade school, my mother had a washing machine that she used outside in the summer.
I wasn’t old enough to understand or even care how it worked, but I am pretty sure she ran an extension cord from the house and hooked a hose up to the faucet at the wellhouse.
There was another hose to drain the water, which she sometimes directed to a flower bed or just let run into the yard 50 feet or so away.
The fascinating thing to me was that she had a bottle of bluing that she would add to loads of white clothes to make them look less dingy. Adding blue to make things look white seemed to edge close to sorcery, but it worked.
As I recall, she just rule-of-thumbed it to know when the clothes were finished. There was no timer and no cycles. The washer just kept churning until she turned it off.
When the clothes were done, in her judgment, she would crank them through a ringer, which she adjusted to hit the happy medium between squeezing out as much water as possible without crushing any buttons.
Then it was on to the clothes line, where she would let them flap in the breeze and sunshine until dry.
She tended to leave the clothes pins on the line when she took down the clothes and I recall vividly the day that she reached for a pin without noticing that a red wasp had recently gone on break and was using the clothes pin as a resting spot.
She yelped loudly and then told me to slice open an onion and bring her half of it.
She had read that raw onion applied directly to a wasp sting would ease the pain. Unfortunately, it took me a while to find an onion in the kitchen, then another while to find a knife.
By the time I found an onion and brought her a slice, she was close to running out of patience.
Years later, I consulted our friend, Google, to see if onions really ease the pain of a wasp sting.
Apparently they can, thanks to an enzyme that breaks down the wasp venom. Good to know.
By the end of this week or early next week, yonder dryer should be working and getting our clothes as dry as the Congressional Record. In the meantime, we continue to use the clothes line.
And to keep an eye out for resting wasps.