A week ago, I spent a gorgeous Sunday afternoon hauling laundry up and down the basement stairs.
Normally, I wouldn’t celebrate having to do laundry, but this day I was able to wash and hang four loads of laundry on the clothesline.
There’s nothing I like better than clothes dried outside. There are just so many advantages.
I save money by not running the electric dryer.
A moderate breeze does a better job of beating out wrinkles than the dryer drum — no more ironing T-shirts.
But what I absolutely love about clothes dried outside is their smell — the fresh, clean, crisp smell. There’s nothing better at the end of a long day than setting my head on a freshly laundered pillowcase and breathing in the smell of sunshine.
On Sunday, I discovered that my oldest son does not share my love of line-dried clothes.
“What smells in here?” he asked as he walked into the kitchen.
He wasn’t smelling the laundry yet, just the air freshener I’d plugged in. It was Clean Linen scent, describe by glade.com as “the fragrance of freshly laundered linen just dried on the line.”
And my son said he hates the smell.
“It smells like grass,” he said.
Then he let me in on a secret.
“When my clothes come in from the line,” he explained, “I spray them with my aqua reef.”
That’s shorthand, by the way, for Old Spice body spray. Who knew when I delivered three boys that I’d still have to deal with scent issues?
I suppose it’s just one more example of our nature to always want what we don’t have. Growing up, I lived in a small town and always wanted to move to the big city. Three years in the big city and I came home to Kansas.
My boys live in the country and want to move to town.
And at least one of them, when it’s so easy to dry clothes outside, longs for the artificial smell of fabric softener sheets and body sprays.