Just a gorgeous day in September

A beautiful early-fall day, the leaves on the verge of turning, the sunshine rich and golden. Doug and I took the boys for a good hour-long walk in the park (and Boscoe did very well on the hills), and then he left to go meet his buddy Chris at a football game and I went for a bike ride.

And then squandered the rest of the gorgeous day, doing chores. Laundry. Vacuuming. Cleaning the goddamn bathroom.

But I did get outside again--to hang the laundry on the line. Do you hang out your laundry? I love the way it makes the sheets smell, and the t-shirts. The towels and socks get a bit crunchy, so sometimes I cheat and use the dryer for those. But I like hanging everything else out and letting it all dry in the sun and the wind.

(And that lovely picture above is not mine; it's from a website called annekimberly.com and I hope she doesn't mind. But if the picture vanishes from here, we'll know that she did.)

Hanging out the laundry isn't something my mother did very often--remember, she had ten kids and lived in Duluth, where it is pretty much frozen tundra land for nine months of the year. But every so often our dryer would break. If it was wintertime, she'd dry clothes on radiators and sometimes in the oven (I hated the smell of toasting socks). And if it was summertime, she'd string up a line in the back yard.

I can't blame her for not using it all the time, though she did when she only had three or four or five children. (And here is a picture, for proof, from back when they lived in Illinois. Didn't she have a fabulous figure?)

I like the fact that hanging laundry saves energy, and money. I like that it's something I do outside in the sunshine instead of in the dank basement (where there could be rats; you never know). And I like that the fact that I can still hang out the laundry means ... winter isn't here yet.

Tomorrow? Another gorgeous day expected. This time, sans laundry. Sans bathroom chores. (Not sans vacuuming, because with dogs you are never sans vacuuming.)

I think another bike ride might be in order.

How are you spending these glorious weekends of September?