This is the kind of line that my dear mother and I used to hang things outside to dry.

Unbeknownst to her, my mother was an early environmentalist.

The recollections of my childhood that I cherish the most are of my mother and the clothesline that crossed our backyard.

She would carry a wicker basket full of damp clothes up the basement stairs and outside into the sunshine twice a week, along with her bucket full of clothespins. She would use the electric dryer only on the coldest days of the winter.

Frequently, I assisted her by passing her wet item after wet one to enable her to peg more quickly. To keep the sheets off the ground, she would then raise the line high into the air and connect it onto the wired pole.

I spent a lot of my childhood reading novels high above the sails of those billowing sheets while perched on a branch in the neighboring apple tree.

Oh, the smell of those clothing that have been sun-dried. Tell about a memory that makes you sigh deeply and smile.

An environmentally conscious campaign is underway to encourage more Americans to air dry their laundry outside. There are others who oppose any attempt to protect the environment. People that go to exurbia in this situation typically do so to escape all they perceive to be wrong with modern America, but they also tend to be opposed to this relic from bygone eras.

According to a story published in The New York Times last week, the 60 million community and homeowner associations in this nation are the main advocates of clothesline prohibitions, with their joint goal being required blandness.

The majority of them prohibit clotheslines outside. Some even forbid locals from tossing a damp beach towel over a railing.

They say that a clothesline lowers the value of a property. gives the impression that your neighbors are too impoverished to own dryers.

An fixation with other people’s underpants also seems to exist. After article after article expresses outraged Americans’ huffs and puffs over the potential terror of witnessing grandma’s waist-highs billowing in the wind.

The Times stated that regulations permitting outdoor clotheslines were approved in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont in the previous year. Such laws already exist in Florida and Utah, and Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia are also considering enacting them.

Why? Because dryers use a large amount of the nation’s electricity.

According to a 2001 Department of Energy assessment, approximately 6% of all electricity used in American homes comes from electric clothes dryers. Not even the electricity needed to run gas-heated dryers is included in this.

You can see how much energy we need to perform things the sun does for free when you realize that all of our indoor and outdoor lighting accounts for only 8.8% of our overall energy usage.

Filmmaker Steven Lake’s pro-clothesline documentary “Drying for Freedom” will be released in May of next year. To encourage more Americans to do their own laundry, the Project Laundry List website (laundrylist.org) provides the following statistics and practical advice:

To reduce wrinkles, snap the clothing before hanging them. Hang the garments inside during chilly weather to add moisture to the hot air. Place your stiff jeans and towels in the dryer on “air” for a short while.

I’m really beginning to sound like a content homemaker. Which gets me to one of the queries that Project Laundry List attempts to address:

Can women wear their garments hanging down? Why, what better way to relax after working all day to dehumanize men? Oh, I really love those kinds of clichés. The author Kathleen Norris is cited on the website:

Women’s labor, the liturgy, and laundry all help to anchor us in reality; they don’t have to depress us. Whether we view our everyday activities as tedious or necessary, life-sustaining labor, they do not determine who we are as women or as human beings.

Now, I adore Norris’s work and value her mystic perspective on all of our feminine caregiving. There is only one rule in this feminist’s house for any intruder who believes he is going to touch the laundry: Stay Out of the Piles. As with a great deal of other feminists, I wash, dry, fluff, and iron.

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