Maryland has now had its wettest Spring on record for my lifetime, and I’m tired of it. We had hideous droughts the last two Summers, and the global warming people were busily peeing themselves in terror. This year, it’s the last week of May, I’m still wearing letter-sweaters to fend off the chill, and my rosebushes have a zillion buds because it’s been wet but no real blooms because there’s been no sun.

The real problem isn’t the depressing grey sky or the waterlogged garden.

The real problem is that I have no clean drawers.

I personally believe that I am very up to date and fashionable because my house is electrified. I live in the city that brought gaslight to the world—until we cooked up the idea, everybody else was still dittybopping around by candlelight—and oh, how we did love our gaslight. Everybody else ditched it by 1920; in the ‘50s there were still several thousand houses in Baltimore lit entirely by gas.

Thus, my electricity isn’t much to shout about; I have precisely enough power to keep all the lights in the house burning at once, but not much else. It’s inadvisable to run the electric washing machine and the dishwasher at the same time; even less advisable to use the computer while running the washing machine if I hear the fridge cycle on. (Not that anything truly cataclysmic will happen, but a fuse WILL blow and I’ll be blown into instant annoying darkness until I can trip my way into the dining room to find candles.) And you thought my tendency to spring-wound gramophones was simply a matter of musical taste…

I rather like it this way. It’s cheap to run. I’m kept from the extravagance and temptations of things like electric dryers and deep-freeze air conditioning and other such notions that cost a lot to install and make the Gas and Electric company rich. Then, I do own stock in Balto G&E, so I’d actually make myself rich, but… oh, bother the circular logic.

The upshot of this whole thing is that I haven’t an electric dryer and therefore have to hang clothes outside. I like doing so not only because it saves money, but because—yes, even in deepest darkest midtown Baltimore—clothes dried outside smell fresh and nice. Also, sunlight is an amazing bleaching agent. I’ll never forget the horrible wine stains that I thought had ruined a fine tablecloth that my grandmother had brought over from Oesterreich. Two turns over my glass washboard and one afternoon in Baltimore sunlight and it was as pure as the day it left Graz. True, because of the never-ending rain this week, I had to bring one load of laundry back in to rinse it because it had been rained on twice in a row, but I hung it back out this morning and it dried quickly and was as fresh as anything.

The idea of hanging clothes outside to dry is one that survives only in inner cities and in far rural quarters. The suburbs find clotheslines tacky—a neighborhood in which my parents looked at a potential retirement home forbade clotheslines. Odd that suburbia should ban the basic trappings of humanity in the process of destroying nature.

In any case, the weather gods have smiled upon me, or at least my underwear drawer, and there’s been a break in the rain. I’ve scrubbed every pair of drawers I own and hung them out to dry, and unless it pours again between now and 7AM, I’m flush in my underpinnings for the next two weeks.