Drying days.

Looking out the window at the city park, I see white sheets snapping in the breeze, like big sea gulls flapping their wings over the snow.  There are kids pulling each other on a runner sled, running slowly over the field of white, their puffy pink- and red-clad legs moving too fast for the speed they're going on the slippery surface.  Behind them, four of the five floors of the apartment building are sporting colorful laundry, hanging from south-facing balconies and fluttering gently in the breeze.  It's February 3rd, but it is sunny outside -- so it's a drying day.

I haven't met a single person in Romania who has a clothes dryer.  Washers, yes -- but when it comes to drying, it's good old clotheslines and drying racks, and none of the electrical, mechanical fluffy warmth I grew up with in the States.  Most of the time I'm fine with this -- I like hanging clothes to dry on the balcony on a warm summer day, bringing them inside toasty from the sunshine.  In the winter, though, this gets more complicated.  Before we had heat in our apartment, it would take our laundry days to dry -- usually three or four, with collars and pocket linings seemingly still damp a week later when you wore the item again.  And the apartment has mold issues, so we were always nervous -- begging the laundry to hurry up and dry out so that the humidity level would decrease.  Now we have heat, so things go a lot faster -- and we recently got our dehumidifier fixed too, so we feel like we're living in the lap of luxury -- but still, it feels like the drying rack is always, always out.

And so sunny days with a bit of a breeze?  Those are good drying days, and we seize them.  The laundry goes in first thing in the morning, to be hung on the balcony (freshly-shoveled to be clear of snow for this very purpose) before we leave for work.  And our home's laundry joins the hundreds of others, flapping happily in the mid-winter breeze.  Drying.  Hooray!