Tuesday is laundry day at my house. 

I have not always devoted a whole day to the task of laundry.  I used to do a load here and and a load there.  Consequently, it seemed there was always laundry to do.  After years of doing laundry this way, I found myself wondering if there was a better way.  One day it dawned on me that perhaps I was not giving this chore the “respect” it deserves. 

I do an average of 5 large loads of laundry in a given week.  Each load takes a couple of hours to wash, dry and fold.  Five loads multiplied by 2 hours each means laundry should take approximately 10 hours to complete.  I decided if laundry is a 10 hour job then I would give it a full 10 hours thereby giving it the “respect” it deserves.

I now devote Tuesdays to laundry so that I can try to get it done all at once.  It is a really good day when I can get all five loads washed and folded before I go to bed.  It is cause for celebration if I can manage to get each pile into each person’s designated spot and everyone takes a moment to put their pile away before bedtime. 

If the laundry is washed, dried, folded and put away in one day then I do not have to think about it for the next six days.  Six days without laundry feels like bliss (although I now do a load or two of cloth diapers in between).

Laundry is a great metaphor for a lot of areas of my life.  If a chore takes 10 hours to complete but I only give it 6 hours, I am going to repeatedly come up 4 hours short.  If I constantly short myself by 4 hours then I am going to feel frustrated every time I try to do a 10-hour chore in a 6 hour time frame.  I treat many areas of my life this way.  I often try to cram more into a given moment than that moment allows for and then wonder why I feel so frustrated.

I am afraid I might be about to add some frustration to my life with my latest Grandma Challenge.  But if ever there was a classic Grandma Challenge this one would be it.  If I wanted to, I could drive to my Grandpa Pickies house right now, string up some line and hang dry my clothes.  The metal bars my Grandma used for line drying clothes for her family of eight are a little rusty, but they are still there and they still work. 

An important part of this year is challenging myself to see if I can lessen my dependence on some of the modern appliances I have come to see as a necessity.  Although I have read the argument that appliances such as the microwave actually save on energy, most appliances are designed to break and not be repaired, thereby landing in the local dump.  A couple of years ago our brand new refridgerator short circuited three times in a row.  We lost a ton of food and spent a lot of money trying to repair it.  The appliance company finally replaced it with a new one.  Guess where the “old” one went.

Aside from the garbage dump argument, I would also like to see if I can burn some of the good kind of energy which is to say the energy my own body generates when I put myself to work.

My husband strung a makeshift clothesline a couple of weekends ago.  I gave it a try last Tuesday thinking it would not be a big deal.  Afterall, I already spend all day doing laundry, right?  How hard could it be to take a few extra minutes to hang it on the line?  I (smugly) intended to write about this Grandma Challenge last week but felt so discouraged after attempting to hang dry one load of laundry that I gave up and wrote about handkerchiefs instead.

I have been humbled and will readily admit I do not think I will be able to see this challenge through until my year of living like Grandma ends on June 23, 2009.  In an effort to be realistic, I am going to commit to trying to hang dry my clothes for four weeks starting next Tuesday, September 16.  Perhaps you are asking, “Why do it all if you know you can’t keep it up for a full year?”  I am going to try because I think I can learn some valuable lessons from hang drying my clothes like my Grandma did.

Do you have any ideas about what lessons I can learn from hang drying my clothes?  Do you hang dry your clothes?  If so, do you have any tips?  Do you have any stories about how your grandparents dried their clothes?