Random question: Why do all those who live in Arizona and California – where it never rains – use energy guzzling laundry dryers, while we in rainy London and Paris put our clothes on the line to dry in our tiny pied-a-terres?

Living as a housewife in Paris for more than ten years – I got used to using the fold-able clothes-racks which you find in every little apartment in this city. At first I used to hang some big clothes – like sheets – out the window on sunny days; but that is frowned upon as not properly classy in this center of all things bourgeois.

It turns out that the cool kids take their duvet covers to be washed, dried and pressed at the ‘pressing’ (dry cleaner) around the corner. Now-a-days yuppie single men do the same thing with their suit shirts. Over course – lower down on the social ladder there are still laundry mats in most neighborhoods that come equipped with huge but expensive driers – you use them if you want to dry your sheets. Otherwise you take your wet laundry back home with you and hang it on your clothes-rack, your shower curtain bar and all around your apartment so that it can dry over the next few days while you are at work.

Back when we had five people living at home and after more than ten years in town, I finally bought a cloths dryer. I put it in the ‘buanderie’ with which our ‘belle epoque’ apartment was still equipped. This is the old fashioned room in which the bourgeoise got their laundry done – probably back before washing machines. When the beautiful blanchisseuse (or perhaps your elderly cousin who was widowed and ‘taking in laundry’ to pay her rent) would come over and wash your corsets by hand – to be hung in the buanderie. The buanderie always had a clothes line that could be pulled up when she left – so as to get the clothes out of harms way – near the very high ceiling. After the short ‘bonne’ (or maid) had pinned all the clothes carefully onto the eye length clothesline, she would carefully lift it with a pully so that the ropes themselves were up in the rafters and the clothes could hang down unmolested.

Our updated pad no longer had the retractable clothes line and it was considerably easier for me to buy and put in a dryer than repair the mechanical clothes drying techniques of days of yore. And it was convenient – if expensive.

But California – Really! You have zero percent humidity and at least 250 days of sunshine a year….Why not dry your clothes the natural way? They smell so nice, don’t they, without having to add the perfumed fabric softener? Oh no – I remember the diesel fumes! Sorry we in California can’t trust our neighbors to hang our clothes in our yards after all anyway. It will all be stolen right?

Still I soon learned that the dryer wears out your clothes much faster than hanging them on the line! Many bourgeois French people spend an hour every Sunday ironing everything – including their lacy underwear. I have never gotten into that (having once been an ‘au pair’ who was required to do that when I first came to Paris) Ironing now triggers me a bit – and I have decided that I can live with crispy cloths the first time I put them on after washing). I knew a fellow professor at a business school I later taught who only ironed his T-shirts. So that is a whole – other – fashion statement. They iron their T-shirts in Kenya too, and they look much ‘smarter’ that way. Still I don’t, I have my own lines in the sand.

Now I am in a 47 meter squared apartment – big by Paris standards – so I have my laundry machine under my stove, no washing machine, a microwave/convection oven and no dryer. That foldable clothes dryer comes in handy indeed.