Enjoying My Solar-Powered Drier

                                                            Published in The Christian Science Monitor 

            When I use the electric drier, I throw the clothes in, set the controls, and let everything tumble. That uses less of my time than hanging the clothes on the line outside, but I decided a long time ago not to rush through life but to savor every moment and every possibility for beauty and learning.

            I shook out laundry and pinned it with wooden clothes pins to the white line stretching between two trees growing on the Girl Scout ranch we took care of 7,700 feet up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Using less electricity to dry laundry is kind to the earth. Electricity is clean where it's used, but it is among the heavy polluters of the industrial culture where it is generated.

            Trying to be kind to the earth supported what I was doing, but I did it for simpler reasons. The sun shone. A warm breeze whispered to the Rocky Mountains. The breeze saved secrets through the warming morning to tell me, if I would come outside and listen.

            I stepped outside to see if it was warm, sunny, and dry enough to hang clothes. It was so wonderful to be outside, I almost couldn't go back inside to get the basket of wet laundry.

            Oregon juncos, small grey birds, the males with black heads and the females with grey heads, enjoyed the sunshine just downhill from our clothesline. They ate seeds from winter-dried grasses. A woodpecker rapped his beak on a nearby tree, then called loudly, "whicca, whicca, whicca," into the morning sunshine. A raven flew over to see what I was doing, landed in the top of a pine tree, and watched the spring green mountainside.

            I shook out towels and t-shirts and hung them in sunshine. Somewhere far down the ridge, a steller's jay raucously warned all forest inhabitants about some kind of intrusion, a bear, a coyote, perhaps a cougar. The breeze toyed with the idea of becoming a wind and tried to push me into the clothesline. I added more clothes pins in case wind decided to try to blow laundry off the line.

            The aspen trees offered densely growing green leaves to sunshine, but they hadn't closed the view below me. I looked through their leaves, whispering excitedly to each other in the breeze, to the meadow, a quarter of a mile from where the house sat in pine, fir, and aspen forest. Three deer grazed green summer grass on the meadow and looked up, listened to wind, smelled it, and looked at the world around them. Content with their safety, they dropped their heads back to the lush grass and browsed across the meadow.

            Uphill from me, somewhere in the forest of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees, a bird whose call I didn’t recognize sang a brief song. I would eventually try to see and identify the singer of that song. I like to know my neighbors and those who pass through the neighborhood. The singing bird in question would probably turn out to be itinerant, stopping for a day or two on its way somewhere else, since I didn’t remember hearing it during several years in the Rockies. If I never saw the bird when I could connect it up with its melodious, brief song, I would still be grateful I had heard the brief beauty of its singing.

            The bottom of the basket showed. About forty elk walked through the gap in the rock ridge across the meadow from me. They browsed across the meadow and into the forest west of the meadow. I watched them over a line hung with laundry. Elk are beautiful creatures and very cautious. Previous experience told me if I hadn’t hidden behind laundry blowing in the wind, they might not have trusted me enough to cross the meadow. Most of the time, I see their tracks, but I don’t see them.

            I hung the last pair of socks and carried the empty basket back into the house. I wrote in the house for half an hour. Because wind blew very dry air of the mountains, the clothes dried rapidly. I took the dry laundry from the wind, washed another load of laundry and hung it on the line.

            I got a different view of my neighbors and of visitors to our part of the mountain when I hung the second load of clothes to dry. I approached the tasks of living in an orderly fashion and got a constantly updated view of the mountain that we call home. There is no modern machine, clothes drier, television set delivering news, computer connected to the changing-by-the-second electronic world, that can give me anything that compares with the benefits I get from using my solar-powered clothes drier. My only regret is that we don’t generate enough laundry to keep me at the clothesline more.

            I’ve learned to deal with that problem. I put the empty clothes basket back inside the house, close the door, and walk in clean and dry clothing down the ranch.   I might find the bird whose song I heard earlier. Winds and breezes will bring me sounds of wildlife, delicious odors of summer, and dozens of stories about the day and the season of these Rocky Mountains.