Why Did I Buy a Drying Rack
…15 Minutes in the Florida Sun
…When My Washer/Dryer Duo Talks to My Phone
It is a single appliance: wash and dry in the same drum, no transferring of wet clothes, no mismatched socks orphaned between machines, and half the lower back pain from bending over. It’s connected to an app that lets me start a load, add fifteen minutes to a load, and receive a polite notification when the load is finished, all without leaving wherever I am. It is a remarkable machine. During hurricane season here in Florida, I am incredibly grateful for my washer/dryer.
However, in an odd twist of fate, today I did something I have been thinking about for a few weeks.
Today I bought a clothes drying rack.
The rack cost about $30.00. A small fraction of the beloved washer/dryer. It folds in on itself, so it fits in my tiny laundry room. I plan to use it outside, on the patio, in the Florida sun.
My remarkably smart machine will dry a load of laundry in approximately one hour. Give or take an hour, depending on whether it’s drying towels or socks. The Florida sun, which is free and which I have already paid for in heat and humidity and the particular weight of August afternoons, will dry the same load in fifteen minutes.
This is a fact I've known for years. One of those truths that quietly rolls its eyes in the back of your mind while you complain about how high the electric bill has gotten. This week, I decided to do something about it.
Here is what I cannot stop thinking about.
The slower tool is faster.
Now I can’t stop thinking about this fact. The slower tool is faster & smarter. The smart I bought to optimize my life is actually the slower way to go. The thing that requires me to walk outside and use my hands is the shortcut. Go figure.
There's no moral here, exactly. I'm not going to suggest you sell your appliances and live like a Victorian. The smart machine is staying. Some weeks, it rains for four days straight, and I am very glad to have a dryer. Some weeks, I do not have fifteen minutes to walk outside, and the dryer is not a moral failing; it is a tool.
But there is something worth noticing here, and it isn't about laundry.
It's about how often the thing we automated turned out to be the one that didn't need automating. The thing we paid extra for to save time and simplify our lives has, over the years, faded into uncertainty about how to use that reclaimed time best now that we have it - but that’s a topic for another post entirely.
What I will say is that we seem to have filled the time with more things to automate.
I think slow living, when it's the real version and not the Pinterest version, is partly this: noticing the moments where the slower tool is the better tool. Not all of them. Not even most of them. But the ones where the work itself and you being present in your own life was actually the point.
Hanging clothes on a rack in the sun is a fifteen-minute act that involves walking outside, lifting wet fabric, draping it onto a bar, walking back inside, and then roughly fifteen minutes later walking back out to bring the dry clothes in. It is laundry, but it is also a small loop of time during which I am outside, in light, doing something with my hands, not thinking about anything in particular.
My phone cannot tell me when the laundry is dry. I will have to look. I will have to walk back outside. I will have to use my own eyes.
I find I am looking forward to it.
Some of the most overrated investments of the last decade were the ones that promised to remove us from our own lives so we could do something more important.
I keep waiting to find out what the more important thing was supposed to be.
So far, it has mostly turned out to be more screens.
The clothes drying rack is going on the patio tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes.
If this landed, you may like this simple sheet I created to try and track using the “Slower Tool” in your own life.
