Would You Like Those Sheets Rare, Medium or Dried?

Winter has descended upon Canton Solothurn. The Jura Mountains and the river valley below are enshrouded in a thick, wet fog which hides the views of the distant Alps and chases everyone indoors.

And I, privately, rejoice.

For now that there is no hope left of a warm breeze or a hint of sunshine, I no longer have to confront the question of whether or not to hang my laundry outside to dry.

When I first moved here, I was full of romantic notions, not only about bells and cows and chocolate but also about line-dried sheets smelling softly of Alpine breezes with – just perhaps -- the slightest hint of Edelweiss. How wonderful, I imagined, to go to bed each night wrapped in the freshness of the outdoors. How delicious to have our clothes bathed in sunshine and wildflower rather than tumbled in a dank, dark drier.

How foolish I was.

You see back home in our South Carolina suburb it was strictly verboten to hang laundry of any sort outside to dry.  The immovable covenants of the subdivision deemed it aesthetically unpleasing for neighbors to have to look at each other’s  damp skivvies on any kind of regular basis, the only exception being the bathing suits and towels flung cavalierly over balustrades and banners on any given summer day. And while I was grateful for other rules concerning an overabundance of garden gnomes or parked RV’s, the injunction against laundry lines seemed thoroughly misguided, especially given the climate which South Carolinians so wantonly enjoy.

And so we moved to Switzerland where, despite cool and rainy summers, each yard comes equipped with its own Stewi, a blue and silver twirling contraption designed for hanging up vast amounts of laundry in a limited amount of space. Because, in case you didn’t know, space in Switzerland is limited.

Unbeknownst to me at the time of my most rapturous laundry fantasies, every yard in Switzerland also comes equipped with its own wood-burning oven with which the Swiss indulge in one of their favorite summer pastimes, known affectionately as grillieren.

These two garden elements, the wood-burning oven and the laundry line, are, in my opinion, completely non-compatible.

In the house we rented over the summer months our neighbors were exceptionally, perhaps one could also say fanatically, fond of grillieren. And no, this pastime was not indulged in on balmy summer evenings as it might be in the States. No, here in Switzerland, the ovens are frequently fired up at lunch time when the Swiss, in all their civility, like to stop for a hot meal.

And so, usually sometime right before noon, just after I had finished poetically hanging my morning load of laundry out to dry, our neighbor, the Grillmeister, emerged from his house. A smile played lightly on his lips while matches and lighter fluid dangled nonchalantly from his finger tips.

At this sight, I knew I had no choice but to abandon my own meager lunch preparations and run outside to unclip the laundry from its blue and silver moorings. Since the drier in the rental house was broken I then resorted to re-hanging my fresh laundry on lines strung up in a dank, dark basement where it would sag for days on end suspended in a state of semi-dryness. Even worse, if I happened to be gone over the lunch hour and unable to perform my rescue mission, I returned home to find the sartorial version of a backyard barbecue awaiting me with shirts, socks and undies all in varying degrees of seasoned, smoked or seared.

Asleep at night in sheets dried thus we dreamt vividly of sausages and sauerkraut.

Those of you with an analytic bent might now be asking yourselves why I did not simply postpone my laundry hanging until after the lunch hour when the embers had cooled and the billows of seasoned smoke had died down. The reason, Dear Reader, is that what might take a generous hour to dry in the South Carolina sun needs the expanse of an entire day in Switzerland. And even the sunniest and clearest of days here is not without the threat of a rain shower which, while imparting even more of the great outdoors to my textiles, comes without the decided benefit of the spin cycle.

Happily, the basement in our new, permanent house is not quite such a dank and depressing place, and in these cool and misty winter months, I am enjoying hanging my laundry up to dry at any time of day or night, safely immured from the culinary ambitions of our neighbors and the vagaries of the Swiss climate. Perhaps instead of hauling the Stewi out next spring I instead will have a mural of the South Carolina sun painted on one of the cellar walls and forego forever my romantic notions of line-dried sheets.

After all, I prefer to enjoy my sausages on a plate.