Things to Think About   Thursday June 17 2010

It specifically says in my apartment lease that I am not allowed to hang a clothesline on my back porch. No, if I want clothes dried, I can take them to one of the complex’s two laundry rooms, or I can hang them to dry inside my apartment, but I may not hang a clothesline outside.

I am of the belief that if you own your own business, you can have whatever silly rules you want, and by choosing to patronize that business, I agree to follow your silly rules. But last weekend, I was getting ready to go away for a few days, and time had gotten away from me a bit. I had wanted to pack an outfit that included some clothes of the air-dry-only variety, but they needed to be washed first. Hung inside my house, they’d take all day to dry (and I didn’t have all day), but hung out in the blazing hot Florida sun, they’d dry in about twenty minutes. So, I hung a clothes line, and those clothes were dry in about twenty minutes.

It’s so silly, I realized, to pay good money to dry clothes in a clothes dryer that is hard on the clothing and makes it wear out quicker, that is also contributing to our dependence on oil and wrecking the environment, when I live in a state that is basically a giant clothes dryer 12 months a year (as long as you watch out for those summer afternoon thunderstorms). The idea that I needed to run to the bank to cash in another $10 for a roll of laundry room quarters to dry my laundry seemed extremely ridiculous to me at that moment. So I set aside my belief in the right of businesspeople to make their own ridiculous rules, and I left up my clothesline, where I dried some more things.

A notice quickly appeared, stuck on my front door: Please remove the clothesline on your porch, it said. There are two laundry rooms available for you within the apartment complex. The only things you may have on your porch are patio furniture and decorative plants. You may not hang a clothesline.

At first I had many visions of myself making some sort of valiant stand for clotheslines in my community, but I’ll probably just go back to hanging clothes to dry inside the house. Because private business owners are free to make whatever silly rules they want, and I did sign the lease knowing full well that clotheslines were forbidden. Still, this incident has left me pondering the curious way in which activities that are good for our environment and are often LESS work than the more environmentally damaging practices we’ve become accustomed to have been depicted these days.

Why doesn’t my apartment complex want me to hang a clothesline? I believe that it is because clothes hung outside makes the complex look unkempt and visually unpleasant. It’s understandable that they–and their residents–would want to live in a visually pleasing community, but why has the sight of line-dried clothes become something deemed trashy-looking? Is it because it makes people think that poor people live here, people who cannot afford to go to the laundromat, and our society is so profoundly classist that we think appearing to lack the money to blow on conveniences is somehow negative, unworthy, and to be avoided at all costs?

In a related issue, a good friend of mine also lives in this apartment complex, and he has recieved repeated warnings of a similar nature to my clothesline notice, instructing him to clean up his garden, which has become overgrown with unsightly weeds. Except, his garden isn’t overgrown with unsightly weeds. It is a much-cared-for collection of plants that are native to this area. The plants attract butterflies and hummingbirds, and thrive in this, their natural climate. Inspired by this friend, I have planted some native Florida plants in my own garden, and they have grown heartily ever since, even when I completely neglected them–whereas the many non-native plants I planted simply because I liked the way they looked have mostly just died after a few months.

What do these two incidents– the anti-clothesline and the anti-native plants incidents– say about the place I live and the place we all live in?

Does it say that living a TRULY “green” lifestyle (not the pretend green lifestyle advertised by new SunChips packaging and recycled paper towels) is associated with being poor and dirty, and is therefore unacceptable?

Does it say that people have absolutely no idea how unnecessarily wasteful their lives are, to the point that simple, effortless activities that happen to benefit the environment with no obvious negatives (except possibly waiting a bit longer for dry clothes) are seen as strange and inappropriate?

Does it say that we’ve become trained to turn automatically to wasteful “conveniences” like expensive clothes dryers when in reality, hanging a shirt out in the backyard is quicker, easier, cheaper, and just as effective? Or that we’ve learned subconsciously that anything that appears without human help, like plants that have not been arranged into a carefully landscaped bank, is somehow in need of our improvements, and if these improvements are neglected, we will seem –god forbid– “poor”?

I don’t have the answers to these questions.  I’m just thinking about them, these days.

What do you think?