What we did when we didn’t have a dryer

I know. In the scheme of life, a broken clothes dryer is not a major problem. Actually, it’s not even a minor problem. It’s just one of those things that happens, especially when that dryer is at least 15 years old. But does it have to happen when five guests are departing from a really delightful visit that spanned multiple generations and several days, leaving towels and linens, not to mention tablecloths and baby burp cloths, all through the house? Yes. I suppose it does.

It is what my mother, a native and highly educated English speaker, would have called “labadika tzuris,” as my spell checker gives up on the first try. Living troubles, troubles that are really not troubles at all but merely annoyances. Thus I am surrounded by laundry, with no clothesline in sight to provide assistance. I look up and down our street and make an observation — an observation I just never made before. Not one of our neighbors seems to own a clothesline either. Probably our condo development doesn’t even allow them. Go know!

My mother, who always had a washer but never a dryer, was addicted to clean laundry. Six days a week something was being washed and hung out to dry. The washing never gave me pause. I always expected her to survive that part of the process, and she never disappointed. It was the drying that scared me.

Mom had two places to dry laundry in our Aldine Street house. One was on the clothesline that was attached from the bedroom window to a distant telephone pole, in the room I shared with my sister. The other was in the basement, two flights down. I was afraid of both of these sites.

The bedroom line was a rope that wrapped around like a pulley, very useful but also very alarming. Here was my mother, pulling that rope toward her so she could continually affix the clean laundry, sometimes pretty heavy laundry at that, with items called clothespins, an item that many of my younger readers may have no acquaintance with. This process was accompanied by a great deal of leaning out the window to make sure the clothespins were on properly and the laundry wouldn’t blow away down the street or even into nearby Irvington. Who knew where that laundry could fly off to? It could be lost forever — and Mom was determined that that would never happen.

Her caution flew to the winds as she leaned out as far as she could to verify and double-check her work. I was always terrified that she would simply fall out the window onto the concrete backyard two flights below, all for the retention of a pillowcase or dish towel or even, most humiliating, someone’s underwear.

So, for me, rainy days were somewhat less scary since on those days she would descend to the basement for laundry-hanging. But the basement itself was gray, dark, grimy, and definitely haunted. There were these enclosures known as bins where the four families who lived in the building stored those items that they probably would never use again but that were too good to throw out. Probably, today, 70 years or so later, those bins are still awaiting their contents being claimed by all the dead people who populated the house from the 1930s onward.

Almost all the rest of the basement was absolutely terrifying, with its huge green furnace, loaded with all kinds of menacing protrusions, constantly making moaning sounds. I was convinced that there was a monster living inside it. Perhaps there was!

The only part of the basement that never scared me was the ping-pong area. Every night I parked my fears and spent my childhood and adolescence playing ping-pong with Marty Hoffman, a member of the only non-relative family living in the house. We both became talented players, Marty more so than I, and I can still competently handle a ping-pong paddle at age 85. So can Marty, at the same age! The rest of the basement was totally terrifying. But Marty, a retired lawyer, remains one of my best friends.

Mom never did get her own dryer. Eventually, she and Dad left Aldine Street for a suburban garden apartment development where the laundry areas contained pay-dryers.

Of course, summers in Parksville were a different story. The Bauman House was proud to offer its guests a pay washer for 25 cents a load. The washer was purchased in 1948 and was a very popular amenity in a place not known for amenities. That remarkable washer lasted for decades, despite constant use during the busy summer months. Like all of its users, though, ultimately it died.

The washer, however, was never paired with a dryer. Mom’s logic was that no one would want their laundry dried in a dryer when it could be hung on a line that was surrounded by fresh, cool mountain air and fragrant wildflowers, making everything smell so sweet. So the clothesline was erected. It had two wonderful features not present in Newark. It was not attached to a menacing window and it was not in a dingy gray cellar. It became a popular amenity in and of itself.

And that is the history of our family dryers.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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