Warm Feelings About Our New Solar Power Clothes Dryer
I drive up the long and winding yellow dirt road that leads to our door. The shape of my front porch seems somehow different, somehow unexpected, somehow off balance. And yet our two-story house seems more home and homey than ever.
Suddenly, I realize what’s making the difference, the change, the shift. Off of the long, white front porch, my bedroom windows are blocked. Instead, freshly-cleaned laundry stirs slowly in the gentle mid-August Georgia summer breeze. Their colors and whites shine brightly under the gaze of the warmth of the hot northwest Georgia sunshine.
There’s something deeply homespun, something satisfying to the core, to see underwear and dish towels and blue jeans and denim shirts and multi-colored t-shirts and long and short socks drying naturally, in a natural solar power clothes dryer, as laundry has dried for years. (It’s not something you could do in the Pacific Northwest very often; in fact, you might get so frustrated at leaving your clothes out that they might eventually start to get mold on them!) But here in the South, where the temperatures soar into the mid-90s, yet the breezes keep me comfortable, it seems that the lighter cotton shirts that are placed first on the clothesline dry almost before the rest of the clothesline is full.
Practical Solar Power Useage
With our solar power clothes dryer there’s no electricity used, no hot air being vented out into the already almost-too-warm afternoon, no spinning or tumbling or roaring of gears, no wasting of power, of energy, or of machinery. There’s simply the effort of reaching down into the basket, the lifting out of the moist clothes, the gently folding over and clipping on to the line. The clothesline itself is simple, a thin rope with loops connecting hooks screwed into the white banisters of the long front porch. And the solar power? It’s almost always there, as long as we watch the Weather Channel, the horizon, and the time.
Even the placement of the drying clothes has a double electricity-saving and ecological purpose, sort of NaturesGuy’s own Green New Deal. The clothes absorb the afternoon and evening sun’s scorching rays, shading our lower windows and keeping the bedroom and office cooler until the sun dips behind the elongating shadows of the oak and hickory trees lining the yellow dirt road that leads to our door.
There is deep satisfaction I feel knowing that we’re drying our clothes naturally. I feel like we’re somehow contributing to the cooling of the planet, to the saving of energy. This simple act connects my family to our fellow natural solar powered clothes drying users across the world and throughout history. It moves us closer to our world, and it infuses our clothes with nature around us.
Solar Power Clothes Dryer Haiku
Other Links to be Checked Out
What else happens on this front porch? Check out my wife’s blog at www.FrontPorchSense.com for common sense political insight and wisdom.
