Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
I once sat next to a very well-dressed man at a dinner party in Montreal. He worked at a Volvo dealership and had come directly from work, dressed in a smart shirt and trousers, a purple tie knotted at his neck.
Somehow the topic turned to clothes and he offered up two pieces of advice: First, get yourself a clothes steamer. He boasted about rarely ironing his clothes, saving himself time and still looking good. His shirt was crisp, with not a wrinkle in sight.
"Tell me more," I said, intrigued.
I had been a laundry lover for some time, always separating darks from whites, delicates from sturdies and handwashing without complaining. I'd insisted on washing my own clothes back at an age when the task often fell under the realm of moms. This was my kind of conversation.
My companion told me his second secret to wardrobe success: He never put his clothes in the dryer.
"Fabric softener ruins the fibres, and clothes last so much longer if you skip the dryer altogether," he said (allowing for errors in my memory).
I was sold. From that day on, I stopped using a dryer for my clothes and began a secret love affair with the drying rack.
Soon after implementing my plan, I realized that not only was I saving money on clothes and laundry costs, I also wasn't wasting valuable energy. Dryers are the SUVs of home appliances; they are weighty and guzzle electricity. I can't tell you exactly how much hydro I saved because I used the laundry machines in my building's basement, but I can tell you I was at least $4 a week richer. And my clothes no longer had flecks of hair on them from the two bulldogs living on the third floor.
Dryerless living was not as big a deal as one might think. Granted, I was single and didn't have children who required multiple outfit changes a day, and I still allowed myself to toss and tumble cumbersome sheets and towels. But hanging clothes out to dry felt like such a very natural thing to do.
I had just moved to Montreal after a few years in London, England, where most people have washing machines but not dryers. It was normal to walk into a friend’s place and see a laundry rack draped with clothes from the week in the living room, like some kind of all-season Christmas tree.
This past year I lived in Mumbai, a buzzing metropolis where everything seemed to be alive, including the buildings, which were colourfully painted and voyeuristic: When you found yourself admiring the rooftop garden on a building across the street, another glance might reveal someone admiring your white bougainvillea plant, or perhaps admiring you.
With all the hustle and bustle, and the occasional rat scampering up their sides, Mumbai’s buildings were alive in more than one way. Though their coloured walls were sometimes diminished by the dust and wear and tear, brightly hued clothes hung out on balcony lines like Diwali decorations. Where balconies didn’t exist, people threaded clotheslines from window to window, furtively creating space wherever they could. Festive saris and kurtas adorned the buildings, signalling that the monsoon rains had abated.
These days, I dry my clothes on a metal apparatus designed for the purpose. Slightly clunky and prone to biting if you don’t manage it properly, it does the job surprisingly well. In Canada, clothes dry quickly in the winter, thanks to the ridiculous amount of heat it takes to keep our homes reasonably warm. A drying rack serves a dual purpose: You’ll find that your clothes dry out in a few hours at most, but your nose doesn’t. The wetness serves as a humidifier of sorts.
Like many Torontonians, I live in a box in the sky. I consider myself one of the lucky ones: I have a balcony, which is decorated with begonias, a lilac bush, geraniums and a spicy-scented curry leaf plant, along with the requisite $10 chairs from IKEA.
Our condominium building, like many others, does not allow residents to hang clothes outside, something that makes me sad because they don’t dry quite as quickly indoors in the summer as in the winter. It seems unnatural to prevent residents from doing what people all around the world do: hang their clothes out in the sunshine. It might be ugly, unrefined or undignified to acknowledge that we wear bras and panties, T-shirts and trousers. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public, they say. But what if it’s clean?
From my condo I have a view of a brick wall and a neighbour’s ashtray, which is perpetually dirty. At least 50 butts squat in its marble centre.
Sometimes, when I’m not-so-patiently waiting for a favourite dress or pair of trousers to dry, I hang them on one of the IKEA chairs and feel a strange kind of liberation, as if the lilacs and I share a mischievous secret.
The neighbour smokes his cigarette, refusing to look up at my balcony and acknowledge that I am there. Perhaps we can’t admit to each other that we’re doing things we know we shouldn’t, though they feel so damn good.
Rashi Khilnani lives in Toronto.