Public laundry in San Miguel de Allende, moved from a higher hill to this location in 1901. Currently used. Photo: Greg Fischer
El tendedero in Spanish is more fun to say than clothesline. Not that the word clothesline is even heard very often. The taut ropes or wires stretched between poles have been against many suburban codes for years. Many children in the US have never seen one.
Here in San Miguel de Allende, los tendederos are on our rooftop garden and we can see many lines of clothes drying in the breeze on many terraces across the town. Every few days, I take a basket of wet clothes up the stairs and find myself enjoying the morning sun, carefully shaking out the shirts and towels, and deciding how to neatly clip corners and waistbands. Pinning the toes of socks side-by-side feels like meditation.
After drying in the sun, the clothes have a pleasant scent of outdoor air, not the fake smell of dryer softeners. Pants, underwear, and socks have a pleasant stiffness or crunchiness when we first put them on.
The day I learned the word el tendedero, I tried to use it in a sentence. “Quiero colgadar mis camisas en el tendedero.” My Spanish teacher corrected me by saying, “Colgadar means to hang clothes in a closet. Tender is the verb used when you mean to hang clothes en el tendedero.”
Certainly, to hang clothes in a closet is a totally different experience than hanging them en el tendedero. What makes a clothesline offensive, I’d like to know? Not a thing. Now I’d fight for the right to have one in my backyard.