Clothes Line

Here’s a silly post that required but a few minutes of time. Where as usually we work hard for the subjects we present, here we get to coast. All we had to do is head out to the side of our palatial mansion, look up and snap a photo. Then peering down, we jot down a few numbers and that’s the story. Never again will it be so easy. We’re looking at feature once commonplace to many homes from mid-century and before. “My mom had one”…says everyone old enough to remember….”and used it.” It’s a plain old clothes line and this one came new with our house long ago. We know this, as scratched in the cement securing one post is the date 1960, the same year our shack was built.

Picture some June Cleaver character, swing dress, pearls and heels, hanging up the day’s wash. Then it’s off to cook meatloaf. A clothes line, something just so damn ordinary. Now no one does it. Keeping the faith, we still use ours from time to time.

We took a short stroll down back alleys in our late 1950s/early 1960s neighborhood and noticed a fair number of houses similarly equipped. Some look usable like ours, but for others it was just the posts or maybe the cement footings left behind. Still, there’s lots of signs. Presumably most of these are also came new with their respective dwellings. It was a thing back then and a feature buyers looked for. Crazy! That’s our neighbour’s clothes line beside our own. It’s exactly the same, but as you can see lacking the line. Our two places are near identical – utterly plain shoe boxes with a hip roof. What an unimaginative era for residential design.

This is not the only retro element we have. There a milk chute next to the side door, once very common too, and our thermostat is one of those round Honeywell models reading in Fahrenheit that everyone had. But those two are for another story.

That same week…Ex-Manitoba Sugar – a little locomotive lit up!

Short Subjects: reports that for any number of reasons are brief in nature. They might be updates to older articles, previews of posts planned or not yet published, brief snippets of things that don’t fit in anywhere else or subjects that are so obscure that information on them can’t be found. Or sometimes we just ramble on about Lord knows what.

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Date of adventure: April, 2019.
Location: BIGDoer HQ.

It came with the house.