An advert on the tube tonight started by mentioning the great clean, fresh scent of line-dryed laundry. Thing is - I knew exactly what they were talking about. You can tell from the smell when laundry has been dried on the line as opposed to spinning in a dryer.
My question, of course, is: Why?
It’s not just a function of leaving the little dryer sheets out of the machines. I’ve run out of them, and tumbled the towels with nothing but hot air. Yet - no fresh aroma.
It can’t be just that outdoor air is so special. It doesn’t smell like laundry all the time. The air in my house is filtered as well I can scrub it, yet neither the laundry nor the upholstery of the furniture smells like it just came in from the line. And when I was a kid, the air wasn’t always that nice - the people a mile or so away raised hogs.
Besides, the air doesn’t just “stick” to the cloth. Or if it did, surely folding and fluffing would have swapped the outdoor air with indoor.
Is it the presence of the sun? Then how come my clothes don’t get sweeter smelling when I’m out in the sun? And shouldn’t it affect clothes left in a car with the sun shining through the windows? Or even the upholstery in my car?
So, is it ions? Ozone? Chem-trails? Etheric magnetism migrating from the clothes-pins into the cloth? Yummy-smelling no-see-um sized critters? Just something that my mum told me and I believed it so strongly that I could smell the difference? Do ya’ll know?
-Calian